Friday, September 19, 2008
James B. Atleson, Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law: A 25th Anniversary Retrospective - This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jim Atleson's book, Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law. Atleson's book is widely considered to be one of the most important contributions to labor law scholarship in the late twentieth century. A diverse group of participants will examine the impact and influence of the book from the vantage point of different disciplines and provide the opportunity to generate new scholarship.
University at Buffalo Law Faculty Moderators and Conference Organizers: Dianne Avery, Fred Konefsky, Rob Steinfeld, Jim Wooten
Program
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Friday,September 19, 509 O'Brian Hall, North Campus | ||
8:00 am |
Coffee and Pastries |
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8:30 am |
Welcome: Rebecca French, Director, Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy |
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8:45 am |
Panel One: Praxis Moderator: Fred Konefsky, UB Law School Values and Assumptions of the Bush NLRB: Trumping Workers' Rights The Value of "Values and Assumptions" to the Practice of Law, or Incorrect Assumptions about the Relationship of Scholarship and Praxis |
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Commentator: Robert J. Rabin, Syracuse University College of Law |
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10:00 am |
Break |
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10:15 am |
Panel Two: Ideology Moderator: Dianne Avery, UB Law School |
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Free to Quit? - Corporate Branding and the Longing to Belong Pedagogy and Critique: "Values and Assumptions" in the Classroom Productive Insubordination in Labor and Employment Law |
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Commentator: Karl Klare, Northeastern University, School of Law |
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12:30 pm |
Lunch |
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1:45 pm |
Panel Three: History Moderator: Robert J. Steinfeld, UB Law School Unexpected Convergence: Values and Assumptions in Public Sector Labor Law, 1959-81 Class Conflicts of Law I: Unilateral Employer and Worker Lawmaking in the U.S. Workplace |
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Commentator: John Witt, Columbia Law School |
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3:15 pm |
Break |
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3:30 pm |
Panel Four: Transnational Legal Norms Moderator: James Wooten, UB Law School |
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The Hollowing Out of Corporate Canada: Implications for Industrial Relations and Labour Law Still Unjaded: Jim Atleson's 21st Century Turn to International Labor Law International Labor Standards, the Privatization of Public Law, and the Employee Free Choice Act of 2009 |
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Commentator: Kerry Rittich, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law |
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Response: James B. Atleson, UB Law School
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Registration 
No fee to attend; however, registration is required due to limited space. Registration includes breaks, coffee, and Friday's lunch. Please respond by Friday, September 12, 2008.
Participants
Harry Arthurs, Osgood Hall, York University James Atleson, University at Buffalo
School of Law Dianne Avery, University at Buffalo School of Law William Gould, Stanford University Law School. Karl E. Klare, Northeastern University School of Law. Fred Konefsky, University at Buffalo School of Law. Wilma B. Liebman, National Labor Relations Board. Joseph McCartin, History, Georgetown University. Jim Pope, Rutgers School of Law. Robert Rabin, Syracuse University College of Law. Virginia Seitz, Sidley & Austin, LLP. Robert J. Steinfeld, University at Buffalo School of Law. Howard Wial, Brookings Institution. John Witt, Columbia University Law School. Jim Wooten, University at Buffalo School of Law.
Harry Arthurs is University Professor Emeritus of law and political science, former Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School (1972-77), and former President of York University (1985-92). Professor Arthurs' research interests include legal education and the legal profession, legal history and legal theory, labour and administrative law, globalization and constitutionalism. He has served as a labour mediator and arbitrator, as a member of many public, professional and academic bodies, and latterly as a Commissioner reviewing Canada's labour standards legislation and Ontario's pension legislation. He has been awarded the Canada Council's Killam Prize for his lifetime contributions to the social sciences, the Bora Laskin Prize for his lifetime contribution to Canadian labour law, and the ILO Decent Work Research Prize for his report on labour standards.
James Atleson is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University at Buffalo School of Law. He has specialized in labor law areas, teaching courses in labor law, collective bargaining, internal union democracy, labor law history, and international labor law. He also teaches a seminar on law and the visual arts. He has taught at the universities of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Texas, and Georgetown. Atleson is also a labor arbitrator, listed by national and local arbitration panels. Atleson's current research focuses on international labor law, especially cross-border collective and sympathetic action. A second concern is the treatment of labor rights as human rights. He is the author of many publications, including
Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law (Univ. of Mass Press, 1983) which is the basis for this conference.
Dianne Avery is a Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo School of Law, where she currently teaches courses in employment law and employment discrimination law and a seminar on sexual harassment law. A graduate of UB Law School, she joined the faculty in 1984. Professor Avery served as Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at UB Law School between 1998 and 2002. As a Visiting Professor, she taught labor law and employment law at Cornell Law School from 1999 to 2000. She is a member of the Labor Law Group, a national association of labor and employment scholars, and served on its executive board from 1998 to 2006. She has co-authored the last two editions of the Labor Law Group’s casebook, Employment Discrimination Law: Cases and Materials on Equality in the Workplace. Professor Avery’s scholarly publications, drawing on historical and social science literature, have focused on labor law, employment law, women's rights, and gender stereotypes. At the invitation of the University of San Francisco Law School, Professor Avery delivered the Jack Pemberton Lecture on Workplace Justice in 2007. She is director of the Labor and Employment Law Concentration at UB Law School. In 2007, the UB Law School Students of Color presented her with the Jacob D. Hyman Professor of the Year Award.
Lance Compa, ILR School, Cornell University.
Lance Compa is a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where he teaches U.S. labor law and international labor rights. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 1997, Compa directed labor law research at the NAFTA Commission for Labor Cooperation. Compa has written widely on trade unions, international labor rights, and other topics for a variety of law reviews, journals of general interest, magazines and newspapers. His most recent book project (with co-authors) is International Labor Law: Cases and Materials on Workers' Rights in the Global Economy (West Law Group, 2008), a 1000-page textbook for use in law schools and social science graduate programs. Compa wrote the 2005 Human Rights Watch report Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants, and is also author of the 2000 HRW report Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards (republished by Cornell University Press in August 2004 with a new introduction and conclusion). In addition to his studies of workers’ rights in the United States, Professor Compa has conducted workers’ rights investigations and reports on Cambodia, Chile, China, Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Sri Lanka and other developing countries.
Marion Crain, Washington University School of Law
Marion Crain was appointed as the Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law at Washington University during the summer of 2008. Prior to this appointment, she was both the Paul Eaton Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Crain's scholarship examines the relationship between gender, work and class status, with a particular emphasis on collective action. She has authored or coauthored over 25 law review articles and two book chapters. She is the co-author of two textbooks, Labor Law: Cases and Materials (Lexis Law Publishing, 2005), and Work Law: Cases and Materials (Lexis Law Publishing, 2005). She is a coeditor, together with Senator John Edwards and Professor Arne Kalleberg (UNC Sociology), of Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream (The New Press, 2007). Professor Crain serves on the Executive Committee of the Labor Law Group, a national collective of law professors dedicated to advancing pedagogy and scholarship on labor and employment law. In addition, she serves on the editorial Board of the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, a peer-reviewed journal focusing on labor and employment law. Professor Crain is a past chair of the AALS Section on Labor and Employment Law.
R. Michael Fischl, University of Connecticut School of Law.
Michael Fischl is a Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1978, he joined the Division of Enforcement Litigation at the National Labor Relations Board and was principal author of the agency’s successful Supreme Court briefs in NLRB v. Hendricks County REMC and NLRB v. Transportation Management Inc. His articles on labor law and legal theory have appeared in the Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, Columbia Law Review, Law & Social Inquiry, the New York University Review of Law & Social Change, and numerous other scholarly publications. He is co-editor (with Joanne Conaghan and Karl Klare) of Labor Law in an Era of Globalization: Transformative Practices and Possibilities (Oxford, 2002) and co-chair of Intell, an international network of progressive scholars and practitioners in the labor and employment law field.
William Gould is a prolific scholar of labor and discrimination law. He recently served as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. Professor Gould has been a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators since 1970 and has arbitrated and mediated more than 200 labor disputes, including the 1992 and 1993 salary disputes between the Major League Baseball Players Association and the Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee. He currently serves as independent Monitor for FirstGroup America, addressing freedom of association complaints. A critically acclaimed author of nine books and more than sixty law review articles, Professor Gould’s work includes his historical record of the experiences of his great-grandfather in Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (Stanford University Press, 2002), and his own Washington story, Labored Relations: Law, Politics and the NLRB: A Memoir (The MIT Press, 2001). Professor Gould is the recipient of five honorary doctorates for his significant contributions in the fields of labor law and labor relations.
Karl Klare is George J. & Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University. He is
a member of the steering committee of the International Network on Transformative Employment & Labor Law (INTELL). Professor Klare drafted the recently enacted Massachusetts "Written Majority Authorization" (card-check) statute.
Alfred S. Konefsky is a Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law. He joined the faculty in 1977 after serving as the Charles Warren Fellow in American Legal History at Harvard Law School and as Editor of the Legal Papers of Daniel Webster at Dartmouth College. He teaches Contracts and a variety of courses in American Legal History, including the subject areas of the nineteenth century (from the Revolution to the Civil War), the colonial period, Law and American Labor History, American Constitutional History, and Melville and the Law. Konefsky's research interests focus primarily on issues in nineteenth century American Legal History, including the ideology and role of legal professional elites and groups in a democratic culture, the relationship between legal doctrine and its social context, and the borderline between legal history and literary history. He is currently at work on a biography of Simon Greenleaf, a mid-nineteenth-century law professor at Harvard Law School. His research has been supported by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Bar Foundation.
Wilma B. Liebman has served as a Member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) since November, 1997, and is currently in her third term. Prior to joining the NLRB, Ms. Liebman served for two years as Deputy Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS). She acted as the chief operations officer of this federal agency, overseeing arbitration, alternative dispute resolution, international affairs and labor-management cooperation grants programs. In addition, Ms. Liebman advised the FMCS Director on issues involving major labor disputes and participated in significant negotiations as needed. She served as Legal Counsel to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters for nine years, as Labor Counsel to the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen for three years, and as staff attorney with the NLRB from 1974 to 1980. Ms. Liebman is a past member of the Executive Board of the Industrial Relations Research Association and of The College of Labor and Employment Lawyers, Inc.
Joseph McCartin is an Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is an expert on twentieth (20th) century U.S. labor, social and political issues. He teaches courses in 20th Century U.S. Labor History, U.S. Since 1945, America Between the Wars, 20th Century (and Modern) U.S. State and Society, and 20th Century U.S. Social History. McCartin is currently working on a book that traces the decline of organized labor in the U.S. since the 1960s, using the 1981 PATCO strike of air traffic controllers as its narrative focus. His previous publications include, American Labor: A Documentary Collection (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), which he co-authored with Melvyn Dubofsky, and Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21 (The UNC Press, 1997).
Jim Pope is Professor of Law and Sidney Reitman Scholar at the Rutgers University School of Law, Newark, New Jersey. Before entering the legal profession, he worked as a welder at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was an active member of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers. Professor Pope’s articles on worker lawmaking and workers’ rights have appeared in a variety of publications including the Columbia Law Review, Labor History, Law & History Review, New Labor Forum (with Peter Kellman & Ed Bruno), and the Yale Law Journal.
Robert Rabin is a former Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow at New York University School of Law. Professor Rabin practiced labor law as a labor union counsel and as an associate with a New York firm. He remains active in the field as a labor arbitrator, mediator, and fact-finder. He co-wrote a case book on labor law and a book on the rights of employees. He is the editor of the American Bar Association's The Labor Lawyer. Professor Rabin teaches courses in labor law, public law processes, contracts, conflict resolution, law firm, and employment discrimination.
Kerry Rittich, University of Toronto Faculty of Law.
Kerry Rittich is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and the Women's and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She teaches and writes in the areas of international law and international institutions, law and development, human rights, labour law, and critical and feminist theory. Among her publications are Recharacterizing Restructuring: Law, Distribution and Gender in Market Reform (Kluwer Law International, 2002); (with Joanne Conaghan, University of Kent), Labour Law, Work and Family: Critical and Comparative Perspectives, (Oxford University Press, 2005); "Core Labour Rights and Labour Market Flexibility: Two Paths Entwined?", Permanent Court of Arbitration/Peace Palace Papers, Labor Law Beyond Borders: ADR and the Internationalization of Labor Dispute Resolution, (Kluwer Law International, 2003) and "The Future of Law and Development: Second Generation Reforms and the Incorporation of the Social" in David M. Trubek and Alvaro Santos eds., The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal (Cambridge University Press, 2006). In 2004, she completed a report for the Law Commission of Canada entitled, Vulnerable Workers: Legal and Policy Issues in the New Economy. Professor Rittich has been the Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard Law School and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University and a fellow at the European University Institute.
A graduate of the University at Buffalo Law School, Virginia Seitz is a partner in Sidley’s Washington, D.C., office where she concentrates in appellate practice in the federal courts of appeals and the United States Supreme Court, focusing on issues of constitutional, labor and employment, and administrative law. She has authored numerous briefs in the United States Supreme Court, including the amicus brief on behalf of retired military officers in Grutter v. Bollinger, cited by that Court in the oral argument and opinion in that case. She has handled an array of district court litigation involving important constitutional and federal law issues, including the Appropriations and Supremacy Clauses of the Constitution, the First Amendment, Title IX, Title VII, the Anti-Deficiency Act, ERISA, RICO, the NLRA, section 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act, and the Landrum-Griffin Act. Her pro bono work includes litigation under the Fair Housing Act, Title IX, the Equal Protection Clause, and the Due Process Clause. Appointed by the leadership of both political parties, Ms. Seitz also served a five-year term on the Board of Directors of the Congressional Office of Compliance. That Board promulgates regulations and adjudicates disputes concerning Members of Congress and their employees under the Congressional Accountability Act.
Robert J. Steinfeld is Professor of Law and Roger and Karen Jones Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law. He is the author of Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge U. Press, 2001), The Invention of Free Labor (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), and numerous articles on the history of labor law in America and England. He has been a Langdell Fellow at Harvard Law School and a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. Professor Steinfeld is currently at work on a book about the origins of judicial review.
Howard Wial is a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. An attorney and economist, he has published on such topics as unionism in low-wage services, enforcement of the minimum wage, trends in job stability in the U.S., and the role of central labor councils in union organizing. He is a co-author, with Stephen Herzenberg and John Alic, of New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Postindustrial America (Cornell University ILR Press, 1998). Dr. Wial has taught at Swarthmore, Brandeis, Carleton, Brown, and Penn State; served as an economist and policy analyst with the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Technology Assessment, and General Accounting Office; and directed research for nonprofit public policy analysis and consulting organizations including the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute and the Keystone Research Center.
John Fabian Witt's research and teaching interests focus on the history of American law. He is the author of two books: Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard Press, 2007), which explores law and American nationalism at key moments in legal history, and the prizewinning The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard Press, 2004). His articles have appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the New York Times, Slate, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book on the history of the law of war. Professor Witt joined the Columbia faculty in 2001 after
clerking for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Professor Wooten teaches courses on Pension and Employee Benefit Law, Federal Income Taxation, and Federal Tax Policy. He has also taught Bankruptcy, Legislative Policymaking, and Law and Economics. Wooten’s research focuses on regulatory and tax policies affecting retirement plans, health plans, and other employee benefit plans. He serves on the Steering Committee of the Tobin Project and chairs its Working Group on Retirement Security. Wooten is also a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and a Fellow of the Employee Benefit Research Institute. In April 2000, the editors of the Buffalo Law Review recognized Wooten for outstanding contributions to the Review. In May 2003, he received a Young Investigator Award from UB's Exceptional Scholar Program for outstanding achievements in scholarly activity. In the same month, UB Law School's Class of 2003 presented Wooten the Faculty Award for outstanding service and dedication. He is the author of The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, A Political History (University of California Press, 2004).