2008 Higgins Distinguished Visitors

Who Mops the Floors for the Fortune 500?

Corporate Self-Regulation and the Low-Wage Workplace

March 18, 2008 • 4:00 p.m.
The Governor Hotel, Renaissance Room
614 S.W. 11th Avenue, Portland, Oregon

Reception to Follow - Please RSVP here

Cynthia Estlund, Catherine A. Rein Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

Cynthia Estlund recently became the Catherine A. Rein Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. She is a leading scholar in labor and employment law, and has written extensively on the relationship between the workplace and democracy. In much of her recent work, she chronicles the current crisis of workplace governance brought about by the decline of collective bargaining and the shortcomings of both regulation and litigation, and charts a potential path out of that crisis. In her book Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy, she argues that the workplace is a site of both comparatively successful integration and intense cooperation and sociability, and she explores the implications for democratic theory and for labor and employment law. Other writings focus on freedom of speech and procedural fairness at work; diversity, integration, and affirmative action; and the significance of property rights in labor law.

Estlund graduated summa cum laude from Lawrence University, in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1978. She then studied government programs for working parents in Sweden as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. She earned her J.D. at the Yale Law School in 1983, and was a Notes Editor for the Yale Law Journal. After a judicial clerkship with Judge Patricia M. Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Estlund reported on the prosecution of human rights abuses in Argentina as a J. Roderick MacArthur Fellow. She practiced law for several years, primarily with the labor law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser. Estlund joined the University of Texas School of Law faculty in 1989, and then the Columbia Law School faculty in 1999, where she was the Isidore and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law until her move to NYU in 2006.

Credit: 1 MCLE in Oregon

Merriwether Lewis, the Air Force, and the Surge

The Problem of Constitutional Settlement

March 19, 2008 • 4:00 p.m.
Northwestern School of Law
of Lewis & Clark College
10015 S.W. Terwilliger Boulevard, Portland, Oregon

Reception to Follow - Please RSVP here

Samuel Issacharoff, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law

Samuel Issacharoff's wide-ranging research deals with issues in civil procedure (especially complex litigation and class actions), law and economics, constitutional law, particularly with regard to voting rights and electoral systems, and employment law. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process, where his Law of Democracy casebook (co-authored with Stanford’s Pam Karlan and NYU’s Rick Pildes) and dozens of articles have helped to create a vibrant new area of constitutional law. He is also a leading figure in the field of procedure, both in the academy and outside. In addition to ongoing involvement in some of the front-burner cases in this area, he now serves as the Reporter for the Project on Aggregate Litigation of the American Law Institute.

Professor Issacharoff is a 1983 graduate of the Yale Law School. After clerking, he spent the early part of his career as a voting rights lawyer. He then began his teaching career at the University of Texas in 1989, where he held the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law. In 1999, he moved to Columbia Law School, where he was the Harold R. Medina Professor of Procedural Jurisprudence. He joined the NYU faculty in 2005. His published articles appear in every leading law review, as well as in leading journals in other fields. Professor Issacharoff is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Credit: 1 MCLE in Oregon