Noah D. Zatz is Professor of Law and Labor Studies at UCLA School of Law, where he has been a faculty member since 2004. He holds an A.B. from Cornell University (1994), an M.A. from Cornell University (1996), and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1999). Before joining UCLA, Zatz worked as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project in New York City, representing low-income individuals and community organizations navigating low-wage workplaces and the welfare system. He clerked for Judge Kimba M. Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Zatz was a fellow at Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs, a visiting fellow at the University of New Mexico School of Law, and a visiting professor at Yale Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. At UCLA, he serves as core faculty in the Critical Race Studies Program and the Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, and as Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Zatz's research centers on employment and labor law, welfare law and antipoverty policy, critical race and feminist theory, and liberal political theory. His scholarship investigates how work structures inequality and social citizenship in the modern welfare state, particularly the legal definitions of work in contexts such as family caretaking, prison labor, workfare, sex work, and court-ordered community service programs. He examines antidiscrimination law's role in addressing labor market inequalities arising from interactions with employers, coworkers, and external actors, including the theoretical foundations of disparate impact claims. Ongoing projects explore 'Get to Work or Go to Jail' dynamics, where state supervision through probation, parole, or child support enforcement links unemployment to incarceration risks, racializing precarious work. Key publications include 'Sex work/sex act: Law, labor, and desire in constructions of prostitution' (1997), 'Working at the boundaries of markets: Prison labor and the economic dimension of employment relationships' (2008), 'Get To Work or Go To Jail: State Violence and the Racialized Production of Precarious Work' (2020), and 'CRT Forward: Tracking the Attack on Critical Race Theory' (2023). Zatz has received an Open Society Fellowship (2017-18), a John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation Faculty Fellowship (2015), and selection for the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum (2008).

Professional Email: zatz@law.ucla.edu