Rate My Professor Noah Zatz

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).