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Veena Dubal

Professor of Law
Veena Dubal

Expertise:

Critical Race Theory, Employment and Labor Law

Background:

Professor Veena Dubal’s research focuses broadly on law, technology, and precarious workers, combining legal and empirical analysis to explore issues of labor and inequality. Her work encompasses a range of topics, including the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on workers' lives, the interplay between law, work, and identity, and the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements.Professor Dubal has written numerous articles in top law and social science journals and publishes essays in the popular press. Her research has been cited internationally in legal decisions, including by the California Supreme Court, and her research and commentary are regularly featured in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, etc. TechCrunch has called Prof. Dubal an “unlikely star in the tech world,” and her expertise is frequently sought by regulatory bodies, legislators, judges, workers, and unions in the U.S. and Europe.  Professor Dubal is completing a book manuscript that presents a theoretical reappraisal of how low-income immigrant and racial minority workers experience and respond to shifting technologies and regulatory regimes. The manuscript draws upon a decade of interdisciplinary ethnographic research on taxi and ride-hail regulations and worker organizing and advocacy in San Francisco.

Prof. Dubal received a B.A. from Stanford University and holds J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases. Prof. Dubal completed a post-doctoral fellowship at her alma mater, Stanford University. She returned to Stanford again in 2022 as a Residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  Prof. Dubal is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Fulbright, for her scholarship and previous work as a public interest lawyer.

  • Data Laws at Work, Yale Law Journal Forum (forthcoming)
  • Digital Labor Platforms as Machines of Production, Yale Journal of Law & Technology (2024) (with Vitor Araújo Filguieras)
  • The Legal Uncertainties of Gig Work, in The Oxford Handbook of the Law of Work (Guy Davidov, Brian Langille, Gillian Lester eds. 2024)

  • The New Racial Wage Code. 15 Harvard Law & Policy Review 511 (2022).

  • Essentially Dispossessed. 121 South Atlantic Auarterly 285 (2022).

  • Entrepreneurial Opportunity or Racial Injustice? Understanding the Third Category of Worker. The Regulatory Review. Spring 2022.

  • Sectoral Bargaining Reforms: Proceed with Caution. 31 New Labor Forum 11 (2021). 

  • Economic Security & the Regulation of Gig Work in California: From AB5 to Prop 22. 13 European Labor Law Journal 51 (2021).

  • Book Review of Union by Law: Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, & Racial Capitalism. By Michael McCann & George I. Lovell. 55 Law & Society Review 521 (2021).

  • An Uber Ambivalence: Employee Status, Workers Perspectives, & Regulation in the Gig Economy, in Beyond the Algorithm Qualitative Insights for Regulating Gig Work. (Deepa Das Acevedo ed., 2020).

  • The Time Politics of Digital Piecework. 2020 Center on Ethics Journal 50 (2020). Translated into Portuguese & re-published in Teoria Jurídica Contemporânea (Brazilian Journal of Contemporary Legal Theory).

  • Disrupting Regulation, Regulating Disruption: The Politics of Uber in the United States. 16 Perspectives on Politics 919 (2018). (co-authored with Ruth Collier & Christopher Carter)

  • Influenza Mandates & Religious Accommodation: Avoiding Legal Pitfalls. 46 Journal of Law & Medical Ethics 756 (2018). (co-authored with Dorit Reiss Rubenstein)

  • Wage-Slave or Entrepreneur? Contesting the Dualism of Legal Worker Categories. 105 California Law Review 65 (2017).

  • The Drive to Precarity: A Political History of Work, Regulation, & Labor Advocacy in San Francisco’s Taxi & Uber Economies. 38 Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law 73 (2017).

  • Winning the Battle, Losing the War? Assessing the Impact of Misclassification Litigation on Workers in the Gig Economy. 2017 Wisconsin Law Review 739 (2017).

  • Labor Platforms & Gig Work: The Failure to Regulate in the U.S. IRLE Working Paper 106-117. (2017). (co-authored with Ruth Collier & Christopher Carter)

  • September 2024
    Data Rights at Work, What is Data Panel, Law and Political Economy of Technology Workshop, Harvard University
  • September 2024
    Data Rights at Work, Worker and Employer Power in the American Political Economy Workshop, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • August 2024
    Data Rights at Work, VII Seminário Nacional do Movimento Advocacia Trabalhista Independente, Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • May 2024
    Panelist, Regulatory Challenges of Gig Work, The Algorithmic Workplace, Northeastern University
  • May 2024
    Myth and Measurement of Wages in Digitalized Labor Management, American Bar Foundation Speaker Series 
  • February 9, 2024
    ClassCrits XIV themed “Demanding Justice in the Face of Retrenchment: Finding Common Ground and Building Coalition Across Borders.” Keynote speaker and panel discussion “Race, Work and Twenty-First Century Organizing
  • September 6, 2023
    Keynote Speaker, XVIII National Meeting of the Brazilian Association of Labor Studies, Brasilia
  • September 5, 2023
    Lecture, Superior Labor Court, Brasilia

 

Prior Courses:

(Log in to view full course descriptions in the UCI Law Course Catalog)