Professor Noah Zatz of the UCLA School of Law was awarded a John Randolph Haynes Foundation Faculty Fellowship for his research project proposal, “Precarious Work in the Shadow of Mass Incarceration.” His research will focus on two crises of inequality in Los Angeles: impoverishing, insecure employment often called “precarious work,” and “mass incarceration” shaped by severe racial disparities. While these are often treated as separate phenomena, Zatz’s project will explore a potentially important but overlooked connection: how the power to punish can produce and validate precarious work.
Haynes Foundation Faculty Fellowships are awarded on an annual basis to faculty members in the Southern California region. The competitive fellowships support well-conceived proposals that break new ground on economic, social and political problems and have potential to influence policy and action in the Los Angeles area.
Zatz's research interests include employment and labor law, welfare law and antipoverty policy, work/family issues, feminist legal and social theory and liberal political theory. His writing and teaching addresses how work structures both inequality and social citizenship in the modern welfare state. He is an active participant in the law school’s David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy and Critical Race Studies Program.
Zatz earned his undergraduate and masters degrees at Cornell University, and his law degree from Yale. He clerked for two judges, including one in the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit. He completed fellowships at Princeton University and the University of New Mexico, and acted as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago School of Law and Yale Law School.
