Legal Commentary

I'm delighted to announce an upcoming PrawfsBlawg book club.  This club will be discussing "The Big Squeeze" by Steven Greenhouse, the labor and workplace reporter for the New York Times.  "The Big Squeeze" is Greenhouse's wide-ranging exploration of the plight of the American worker.  Looking at both broad trends and individual stories, he paints a fairly grim picture of inequality and unfairness in the workplace.  "The Big Squeeze" has been praised as "an important and infuriating book . . . [that] tells, in detail, how far we as a nation have sunk from the standards of workplace decency that once existed here and that many Americans still take for granted."

Joining Orly Lobel and me for the club will be Melissa Hart and Noah Zatz.   Melissa is a professor at the University of Colorado Law School.  She has written extensively on employment discrimination issues, with a focus on litigation and compliance.  Her paper "Learning from Wal-Mart" can be found here.  Noah is a professor at UCLA School of Law.  His research interests include employment & labor law, welfare law and antipoverty policy, work/family issues, feminist legal & social theory, and liberal political theory.  This year Noah is a fellow in the Program on Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Steven Greenhouse will also be joining us for the discussion.  Greenhouse's articles are must-reads for labor and employment law professors, and I expect that many profs will be interested in hearing more about "The Big Squeeze."  In fact, I have heard that the book is already finding avid readers in law school seminars.  Greenhouse is an alum of NYU Law, having finished first in his class, so it's not surprising that his work is so adept in its legal analysis.  He is also a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

The Book Club will begin on Monday, September 22.  We look forward to seeing you then.