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Respecting Expecting: The 30th Anniversary of the PDA
November 7-8, 2008

Registration | Schedule | Speaker Biographies

Please join the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism at a Symposium celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. We will be commemorating this landmark occasion, along with the twentieth anniversary of the Journal, with a symposium featuring the women and men who have been involved in every critical phase of the decades-long campaign for sex equality in the workplace. The event will bring together distinguished advocates and scholars from across the country to share their insights into the PDA and the future of workplace equality. Judge Marsha Berzon will be our Keynote speaker.

Registration

Online registration is now closed. Please register in person in Room 122 of Yale Law School.

Schedule

Speaker Biographies

Sam Bagenstos

Sam Bagenstos earned his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard in 1993, receiving the Fay Diploma (awarded to the student who graduates with the highest combined average for three years of study). He was Articles Office Co-Chair for the Harvard Law Review.

He clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit for one year and then joined the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Following three years in that position, he served as Law Clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court (1997-98). He was appointed Research Fellow and Lecturer in Law for one year at Harvard and became Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard in 2000. He joined the Washington University Law faculty, as Professor of Law, in 2004.

Sam's research focuses on civil rights and antidiscrimination law - with some emphasis on disability law and the Americans with Disabilities Act - as well as federalism doctrine. His articles include: "The Perversity of Limited Civil Rights Remedies: The Case of 'Abusive' ADA Litigation," 54 UCLA L. Rev. 1 (2006); "The Structural Turn and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Law," 94 Cal. L. Rev. 1 (2006); "The Future of Disability Law," 114 Yale L.J. 1 (2004); and "Antidiscrimination, Accommodation, and the Politics of (Disability) Civil Rights," 89 Va. L. Rev. 825 (2003). His article, "Spending Clause Litigation in the Roberts Court" is forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal. Sam is also an active appellate and Supreme Court litigator in civil rights and federalism cases. He argued and won United States v. Georgia, 546 U.S. 151 (2006), which upheld, as applied to his client's case, the constitutionality of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Honorable Marsha S. Berzon

Judge Marsha S. Berzon is a graduate of Radcliffe College and the law school at the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall), where she was Articles Editor of the California Law Review. She served as a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., of the United States Supreme Court and for Judge James R. Browning of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Before joining the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Berzon worked as an appellate and Supreme Court advocate at Altshuler, Berzon, Nussbaum, Rubin & Demain, a San Francisco law firm. She presented cases in most of the federal circuit courts and the appellate courts of California and several other states. She filed briefs in dozens of cases in the United States Supreme Court, appearing four times as an oral advocate before the Court. Among the cases in which she participated were many setting important precedents in the fields of labor and employment law, environmental law, women's rights, and free speech. In the Fall of 1994, Judge Berzon was practitioner in residence at Cornell Law School, where she taught Supreme Court litigation; in the Fall of 1998, she was a practitioner in residence at Indiana University Law School; in the Fall of 2003, she was the Alvin B. and Janice Rubin Lecturer at the Paul F. Hebert Law Center of Louisiana State University. She has received the Faye Stender Award from the California Women Lawyers' Association for her contribution to establishing the legal rights of women; the Alumna of the Year award from the California Law Review; the American Jewish Committee's Learned Hand Award; and the American Bar Association's Margaret Brent Award.

Judge Berzon was confirmed as a judge of the Ninth Circuit on March 9, 2000. Judge Berzon is currently a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a member of the American Law Institute, and an Advisor to the American Law Institute Restatement of Employment Law.

Cynthia Thomas Calvert

Cynthia Thomas Calvert is Co-Director of the Project for Attorney Retention (PAR) and Deputy Director and General Counsel of WorkLife Law (WLL), a nonprofit research and advocacy center at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. WLL seeks to eliminate employment discrimination against family caregivers such as mothers and fathers of young children and adults with aging parents. WLL works with employers, employees, attorneys, legislators, journalists, and researchers to identify and prevent this discrimination.

Ms. Calvert practices employment law in the District of Columbia and Maryland. She was with the D.C. litigation firm of Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, L.L.P. (now part of Baker Botts LLP) for fourteen years, six as a partner. She now has her own practice, which centers on counseling small businesses about issues such as wage and hour regulations, non-compete clauses, employment contracts, employee manuals, and sexual harassment prevention. She is also co-director of the Project for Attorney Retention, an initiative of WLL that studies work/life balance for attorneys.

Ms. Calvert is co-author, with Joan Williams, of WorkLife Law's Guide to Family Responsibilities Discrimination Law (forthcoming 2006) and of Solving The Part-Time Puzzle: The Law Firm's Guide to Balanced Hours (NALP, October 2004). She has written numerous articles that have appeared in publications such as the ABA's Law Practice Management, The Legal Times, Corporate Counsel, Women Lawyers Journal, The San Diego Lawyer and Raising The Bar (Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia), and on the Internet. She has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, ABA Journal, Associated Press, National Law Journal, New York Lawyer, Legal Times, Financial Times, Diversity & the Bar, Maryland Daily Record, and other publications. She is currently working on a book about how lawyers at law firms can succeed on part-time schedules. Ms. Calvert is a cum laude graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center. After graduation, she clerked for the Honorable Thomas Penfield Jackson, United States District Court for the District of Columbia. She is married and has two children.

Deborah Dinner

Deborah Dinner is a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at New York University School of Law and a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Yale University. Her dissertation is entitled "Pregnancy at Work: Feminism, Maternalism, and the Shaping of Sex Equality Law, 1966-1991." The project examines the twists and turns of political ideology and legal strategy made by business executives, union leaders, judges, attorneys, physicians, conservative activists, and feminists, as they negotiated the meaning of pregnancy for women's citizenship. Dinner graduated from Yale Law School in 2005 and served as a law clerk to Judge Karen Nelson Moore on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

William Eskridge

Chai R. Feldblum

Chai R. Feldblum is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where she directs the Federal Legislation and Administrative Clinic and teaches statutory interpretation and administrative law. A graduate of Harvard Law School, a former law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun, and one of the lead lawyers who drafted and negotiated the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, Professor Feldblum has been a leader over the past two decades in the areas of disability rights, gay rights, health and social welfare policy, and the workplace through both practical advocacy efforts and scholarly contributions.

In 2003, Professor Feldblum launched and now co-directs Workplace Flexibility 2010, a multi-year effort of research, outreach and consensus building designed to advance a national policy on workplace flexibility for the United States. See www.workplaceflexibility2010.org. The structure of Workplace Flexibility 2010 is based on Professor Feldblum's theory of advocacy, set forth in The Art of Legislative Lawyering and the Six Circles Theory of Advocacy, 34 McGeorge Law Review 785 (2003), and the theory of the enterprise is discussed in "Policy Challenges and Opportunities for Workplace Flexibility: The State of Play in 2008," in a forthcoming Urban Institute publication.

Sonia Pressman Fuentes

Sonia Pressman Fuentes was born in Berlin, Germany, and came to the U.S. with her family on May 1, 1934, to escape the Holocaust. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Cornell University and a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Miami (Florida) School of Law. She has been involved in women's rights since 1963, when she testified in Congress in favor of the passage of the Equal Pay bill on behalf of the ACLU. In 1965, she joined the General Counsel's office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as its first woman attorney. She compiled one of the EEOC's earliest Digests of Legal Interpretations, its first Guidelines on Pregnancy, and the EEOC's decision finding that airlines violated the law when they terminated or grounded stewardesses on marriage or reaching the age of 32 or 35. She is a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), Federally Employed Women (FEW) on the national level and Women in Management (WIM) in Fairfield County, CT.

Ms. Fuentes has lectured extensively in this country and abroad on women's rights and has written numerous articles on that subject in law reviews and other publications both in the U.S. and abroad. Her testimony was presented to a Select Committee of the House of Lords when England was considering the passage of legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in employment, and she was a consultant to the Women's Department and the Department of Labour for the Province of Ontario when Ontario was considering the passage of such legislation. Since her retirement in May 1993, she has maintained her activism for women's rights and devoted herself to two new careers: as a writer and public speaker. She is the author of a memoir, Eat First-You Don't Know What They'll Give You, The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter. Let It Be Already, a play based on her memoir, will have a play reading in New York City on December 21, 2008.

Naomi Gerstel

A Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Naomi Gerstel's research and teaching focus on family and work and inequalities rooted in gender, class, and race. Her current research consists of two projects, one on care to relatives and friends and the other on the processes that shape U.S. workers' hours and schedules. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation and has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Contexts, Social Forces, Social Problems, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Gender & Society, among others. Her most recent articles have examined marriage as a greedy institution, the effects of women's employment on care to kin and friends, effects of race on caregiving, labor union's family policies, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the hours and schedules of medical personnel. Her co-authored and co-edited books include Commuter Marriage, Families at Work, Families and Work, and Public Sociology. She has received the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award, Samuel F. Conti Award and the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Race, Class and Gender Section Award for Distinguished Article. She chaired the ASA Family Section and co-edited the ASA Rose Book Series and the Backstage Column for Contexts.

Joanna Grossman

Joanna Grossman's primary research interests are sexual harassment, work/family issues, pregnancy discrimination, state regulation of marriage, and the history of family law. She is visiting Vanderbilt from Hofstra University School of Law, where she is professor of law and associate dean for faculty development, during fall 2008. She has served on the Hofstra faculty since 1999 and as Hofstra's Associate Dean for Faculty Development since 2004. She has also taught as an associate professor at Tulane Law School and as a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

She graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School, where she served as the articles development editor of the Stanford Law Review and was elected to Order of the Coif. Professor Grossman served as a law clerk to Judge William A. Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, before spending a year as staff counsel at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C., as recipient of the Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship. She practiced law from 1996 to 1998 at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Williams & Connolly. She has published articles in the Stanford Law Review, Harvard Women's Law Journal, and the American Journal of Legal History, among other journals. She co-edited and introduced a recent symposium in the Family Law Quarterly on third-party rights and obligations with respect to children. She is a regular columnist for FindLaw's Writ and has served on the editorial board of Perspectives, the magazine of the ABA's Commission on Women in the Profession. Professor Grossman was selected to deliver Hofstra University's Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 2004 and was inducted into Long Island's "40 Under 40" in 2005.

Stuart J. Ishimaru

Stuart J. Ishimaru is a member of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The EEOC enforces United States laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age and disability. Mr. Ishimaru previously served from 1999-2001 as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and supervised employment discrimination cases, fair housing and fair lending cases, criminal police misconduct, hate crime and slavery prosecutions, and enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act. He also served as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division from 1994-1999. In 1993, Mr. Ishimaru was appointed by President Clinton to be the Acting Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and from 1984-1993 served on the professional staffs of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights and two House Armed Services Subcommittees of the U.S. Congress. Mr. Ishimaru received his A.B. in Political Science and in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his law degree from the George Washington University. He is married to Agnieszka Fryszman, an attorney, and they have two sons, Matthew and Benjamin.

Nicholas Pedriana

Nicholas Pedriana is a sociologist and currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Legal Studies at Northwestern University. His primary research interests are law, organizations, culture, and collective action/social movements for progressive change. His past work includes articles on the early legal development of equal employment law, and in particular the dynamic relationship between legal institutions and the civil rights and women's movements. He is currently working on a historical-comparative analysis of the divergent trajectories of U.S. equal employment, equal housing, and voting rights policy from their origins in the 1960s to the present.

Judith Resnik

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches and writes about federalism, procedure, feminism, and local and global interventions to diminish inequalities and subordination. In the 1980s, when at USC Law Center, she was a co-author of an amicus brief in the Cal Fed litigation, on whether the PDA preempted state statutes permitting workers to take leaves from their workplace. Professor Resnik's recent essays include "Ratifying Kyoto at the Local Level: Sovereigntism, Federalism, and Translocal Organizations of Government Actors (TOGAs)" (Arizona L. Rev. 2008, with Joshua Civin and Joseph Frueh); "Law as Affiliation," (Int'l J. Const.L., 2007), and "Representing Justice: From Renaissance Iconography to Twenty-first Century Courts" (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 2007, with Dennis E. Curtis). Forthcoming books include Migrations and Mobilities: Gender, Borders, and Citizenship (co-edited with Seyla Benhabib and to be published in 2009 by New York University Press). Prof. Resnik is a Managerial Trustee of the International Association of Women Judges, a former co-chair of Yale's Women Faculty Forum, the founding director of Yale's Arthur Liman Public Interest Program and Fund, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. She has also chaired the Sections on Procedure, on Federal Courts, and on Women in Legal Education of the American Association of Law Schools. In 2008, she received the Outstanding Scholar of the Year award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. Professor Resnik is a graduate of Bryn Mawr and NYU Law School.

Susan Deller Ross

Susan Deller Ross is a Georgetown University Professor of Law and Director of its International Women's Human Rights Clinic. Her most recent publication is Women's Human Rights: The International and Comparative Law Casebook (U. Penn. Press, Aug. 2008). She co-authored one of the first casebooks on women's rights issues, Sex Discrimination and the Law: Causes and Remedies (1975), as well as Sex Discrimination and the Law: History, Practice, and Theory (1996). In other books and articles, she has written about parental leave, sexual harassment, domestic violence, polygyny as a violation of women's human rights, and the role of fact-finding in advancing women's human rights.

Throughout her career, Ross has contributed to many women's rights victories. In 1971, the Supreme Court issued its first Title VII women's rights decision, Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp., granting women with pre-school age children the same right to work as men with pre-school age children; Ross, a third year law student, co-authored the ACLU amicus brief. At the EEOC, she helped convince the Commission to adopt new pregnancy discrimination guidelines in 1972. They protected pregnant women from being fired while they were able to work, and gave them equal medical and sick leave benefits when they were hospitalized or recuperating from childbirth. After the Supreme Court rejected that approach, she became Co-Chair of the Coalition to End Discrimination Against Pregnant Workers, which quickly won passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 to reinstate the EEOC guideline approach. Later she helped insure that the Family and Medical Leave Act covered both men and women, rather than the woman-only approach first suggested.

Her ACLU Women's Rights Project litigation helped establish women's right to equal pension benefits with men, both at the federal trial level (Peters v. Wayne State University in 1979) and Supreme Court (Los Angeles Department of Water & Power v. Manhart in 1978). At the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, her litigation projects resulted in Kentucky women prisoners gaining the right to equal vocational training programs with men and thousands of Rhode Island mothers receiving more than $2,000,000 to compensate them for the denial of full PDA sick leave benefits. Since 1983, she has taught at Georgetown Law, specializing in gender issues, including employment discrimination, domestic violence, and international women's human rights.

Vicki Schultz

Vicki Schultz is the Ford Foundation Professor of Law and the Social Sciences at Yale Law School, where she teaches courses on employment discrimination law, social science and the law, workplace theory and policy, work, gender and the law, feminist theory, and related subjects. Schultz has written and lectured widely on a variety of subjects related to antidiscrimination law, including workplace harassment, sex segregation on the job, work-family issues, working hours, and the meaning of work in people’s lives. Her published work includes "Sex and Work," 18 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 223 (2006), "The Need for a Reduced Workweek in the United States," in Judith Fudge & Rosemary Owen, eds., Precarious Work, Women, and the New Economy: The Challenge to Legal Norms (2006), "The Sanitized Workplace," 112 Yale Law Journal 2061 (2003), "Life’s Work," 100 Columbia Law Review 1881 (2000), and "Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment," 107 Yale Law Journal 1683 (1998). Schultz is currently working on an intellectual and conceptual history of antidiscrimination law which traces the emergence of a new paradigm, and an analysis of the likely effects of marriage on the division of housework and childcare in gay and lesbian couples. She is also giving the keynote address and writing an essay on "Civil Rights and the Low Wage Worker" for the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

Schultz is a past president of the Labor and Employment Section of the Association for American Law Schools and a past Trustee of the Law and Society Association. She has held significant fellowships, including the Evelyn Green Davis fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and fellowships at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (her alma mater) and will visit UCLA Law School in 2009. A former trial attorney at the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Schultz began her academic career at the University of Wisconsin Law School where she became interested in law and sociology. At Yale, she has run the Workplace Theory and Policy Workshop and the Work and Welfare group, interdisciplinary groups that explore legal and social inequality. Schultz lives in Woodbridge, Connecticut with her family.

Judy A. Scott

For over 30 years, Judy Scott has held key labor law positions in a wide range of unions in both the private and public sectors, having served as in-house legal counsel to the United Auto Workers, AFSCME, United Mine Workers, and Teamsters (as its General Counsel). Her career has included Big Three auto talks, the 1989 historic United Mine Worker victory at Pittston Coal Company, extensive internal union governance and arbitration matters, and most recently, innovative organizing pacts within the private healthcare industry. In 2002, Ms. Scott was selected to give the prestigious Henry Kaiser lecture at Georgetown University School of Law.

In addition, Ms. Scott has given special attention to issues affecting women workers, beginning with her work on the implementation of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act amendment in 1979 auto negotiations. For many years, she has served on the Board of the National Partnership for Women and Families. She was the legislative representative for the former Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, advocating on Capitol Hill for labor, civil rights and social justice issues. Ms. Scott also is co-author of the widely used book, Organizing and the Law. During the Clinton years, she served as a Presidential appointee on the Advisory Committee to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Ms. Scott graduated from Wellesley College (BA) in 1971 and holds a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law (JD, 1974). Before attending law school Ms. Scott worked for the Frontier Nursing Service in Hyden, Kentucky.

Patricia Shiu

Patricia Shiu is the Vice President of Programs at the Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center (LAS-ELC), where she oversees the LAS-ELC's legal programs and projects aimed at improving the economic well being of poor and marginalized workers and their families. As director of the LAS-ELC Domestic Violence and Employment Project and the Gender Equity Project, Pat works to secure for low-wage women workers the right to work in a safe and healthful environment free of discrimination, harassment and unequal terms and conditions of employment. Pat has also championed the need of working poor families to have accommodations for families with children and she is a nationally recognized expert in family leave laws.

Pat has devoted her remarkable public interest career of 21 years to ensuring that poor women, particularly immigrants, women of color, single mothers, and those who are disabled are treated legally, fairly and with dignity. Recently her cases have included a challenge to discrimination and harassment in police departments and other nontraditional workplaces; the denial of paid family to a worker who son was dying of AIDS and another whose mother was terminally ill; the payment of lesser wages to women working in jobs just above the minimum wage; the refusal of a public school district to provide equal athletic facilities to girls while spending thousands of dollars on a baseball field for boys; and the refusal of a local government to transfer a victim of domestic violence to work site away from the reach of the man who was threatening her. Making a direct link between education and employment opportunities for those who are poor Pat has expanded her docket to include issues concerning educational access for students who are discriminated against on the basis of gender, race, or disability. In a groundbreaking settlement Pat, along with co-counsel, secured a settlement in Lopez v. San Francisco Unified School District that sets a national standard for the integration of students with disabilities into public school systems.

In addition, Pat's work has affected the lives of thousands of low income workers though court decisions which established important precedents, including: the protection of the California pregnancy disability leave law from preemption by Title VII in California Savings and Loan v. Guerra; limits on the scope of a plaintiff's psychiatric examination in sexual harassment cases in Vinson v. Alameda Superior Court; and successful challenge to "fetal protection" policies in Johnson Controls, Inc. v. California Fair Employment and Housing Commission. At the state and federal level, Pat also played a key role in advocating for and helping to draft legislation that led to the passage of the California Family Rights Act, the Federal Family and Medical Leave Act, and California's recently enacted Paid Family Leave Act.

Prior to joining the LAS-ELC, Pat worked as an associate at the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro. She received her J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 1982 and her B.A. in Political Economy of Industrialized States from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979. Pat is past board president of California Women Lawyers and currently serves as Treasurer of the Board of the National Employment Lawyers Association. She has served on the Boards of the Asian American Bar Association, California Rural Legal Assistance, and the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association.

Pat has received numerous honors for her work including the California Women's Law Center's 2002 Abby J. Leibman Pursuit of Justice Award and the Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area Coalition's 2002 Woman Warrior Award, and most recently the Asian American Bar Association's 2005 Joe Morizumi Lifetime Achievement Award.

Reva Siegel

Reva Siegel is Deputy Dean and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality, and to analyze how popular movements interact with representative government and courts in shaping constitutional understanding. Professor Siegel is co-editor, with Jack Balkin, of The Constitution in 2020 (Oxford University Press 2009), and co-author, with Paul Brest, Sanford Levinson, Jack Balkin, and Akhil Amar of Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (Aspen Publications, 5th ed. 2006).

Over her career Professor Siegel has explored the family as a site of citizenship struggle. Recent work includes: "Dignity and the Politics of Protection: Abortion Restrictions Under Casey/Carhart," 117 Yale L.J. 1694 (2008); "The Right's Reasons: Constitutional Conflict and the Spread of Woman-Protective Antiabortion Argument," 57 Duke L.J. (2008); "Sex Equality Arguments for Reproductive Rights: Their Critical Basis and Evolving Constitutional Expression," 56 Emory L. J. 815-42 (2007); "Constitutional Culture, Social Movement Conflict and Constitutional Change: The Case of the de facto ERA," 94 Cal. L. Rev 1323-1419 (2006); "'You've Come A Long Way, Baby': Rehnquist's New Approach to Pregnancy Discrimination in Hibbs," 58 Stan. L. Rev. 1871-98 (2006).

Gillian Thomas

Gillian Thomas is a Senior Staff Attorney with Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund) in New York City. Gillian litigates employment discrimination cases on behalf women in "nontraditional" occupations such as the construction trades and firefighting. Before joining Legal Momentum, Gillian worked in private practice representing employees in employment discrimination litigation at Vladeck, Waldman, Elias and Engelhard in New York City and Willig, Williams & Davidson in Philadelphia. Also while in Philadelphia, Gillian practiced commercial litigation at Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis. Gillian received her B.A. from Yale College and her J.D. from the University of Michigan, where she was a Contributing Editor to the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. After law school, she clerked for the Hon. John T. Nixon of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.

Michelle Travis

Michelle Travis is a Professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she teaches employment law and related subjects. She received her J.D. from Stanford Law School, where she served as the Executive Editor of the Stanford Law Review, and she received her B.A. in psychology from Cornell University. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable David M. Ebel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and she practiced employment law at Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe. Professor Travis' research focuses on sex discrimination and disability discrimination in the workplace. Her recent scholarship analyzes the potential for using employment discrimination law as a means for requiring employers to provide greater workplace flexibility, such as part-time positions, job-sharing arrangements, and telecommuting options.

Linda White

Linda White's areas of research include Canadian and comparative public policy; gender and public policy, focusing on Canada and the United States; and comparative welfare states. Published articles on comparative social policy appear in Canadian Public Policy, Comparative Political Studies, French Politics, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Journal of European Public Policy (with Ailsa Henderson), Journal of Family Issues, and the American Review of Canadian Studies. In a second vein of research, she has an article in the Canadian Journal of Political Science addressing the issue of public funding of minority religious schools. She also is the author with Jacquetta A. Newman of Women, Politics, and Public Policy: The Political Struggles of Canadian Women (Oxford U.P. Canada, 2006) and a co-editor (with Richard Simeon, Robert Vipond, and Jennifer Wallner) of The Comparative Turn in Canadian Politics (UBC Press, 2008). Current projects include a comparative analysis of law, public policy, and women's rights in Canada and the United States; and an examination of the universal pre-kindergarten movement and explanations for variation in policy adoption across U.S. states and Canadian provinces. She holds the following degrees: B.A. Hons (Victoria), M.A. (Queen's), Ph.D. (Toronto).

Joan C. Williams

Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law, 1066 Foundation Chair, and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law. A prize-winning author and expert on work/family issues, she is author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2000), which won the 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, as well as three other books and over sixty law review articles. According to The New York Times, "she has something approaching rock-star status" for her work on family responsibilities discrimination, which was prominently cited in the landmark case Back v. Hastings on Hudson Union Free School District, 2004 U.S. App. Lexis 6684 (2d Cir. April 7, 2004) and by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its 2007 Guidance on Discrimination Against Caregivers. With co-authors Monica Biernat and Faye Crosby, Williams won the Distinguished Publication Award by the Association for Women in Psychology (probably the only lawyer ever to do so) for a special 2004 issue of the Journal of Social Issues on "maternal wall bias" against mothers (a term she popularized). In 2006, she received the American Bar Association's Margaret Brent Award for Women Lawyers of Achievement. In Spring 2008, she gave the Massey Lectures on American Civilization at Harvard University, titled "Obama Eats Arugula: Reshaping the Electoral and Everyday Politics of Work and Family."