Professor Kate Andrias smiling

Kate Andrias

  • Patricia D. and R. Paul Yetter Professor of Law
Education

J.D., Yale Law School, 2004
B.A., Yale College, 1997

Areas of Study
Areas of Specialty

Constitutional Law
Labor and Employment Law
Law and Democracy
Law and Social Movements

Kate Andrias teaches and writes in the fields of constitutional law, labor law, and administrative law. Her scholarship probes the failures of U.S. law to protect workers’ rights, examines the efforts of historical and contemporary worker movements to transform legal structures, and analyzes how labor law and constitutional governance might be reformed to enable greater political and economic democracy. Drawing from constitutional law, administrative law, and legal history perspectives, she also has explored the relationship between law and the perpetuation of economic inequality. She frequently provides advice on policy initiatives to legislators and workers’ rights organizations and works on related litigation.

Prior to law school, Andrias worked for several years as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union. After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School, she clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 on the U.S. Supreme Court. Andrias practiced political law at Perkins Coie and served as associate counsel and special assistant to President Barack Obama and as chief of staff in the White House Counsel’s Office.

She joined the faculty of Michigan Law School in 2013 and was the recipient of its L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. She joined the faculty of Columbia Law School in 2021 and also has served as an academic fellow at Columbia Law School and taught American Constitutional Law as a visiting professor at L'Institut d'Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris. Andrias served as a commissioner and the rapporteur for the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and sits on the Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society.

Publications

Selected Publications (available on SSRN):

  • "The Chicken-and-Egg of Law and Organizing: Enacting Policy for Power Building", 124 Columbia L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024) (co-authored with Benjamin I. Sachs)
  • "Constitutional Clash: Labor, Capital, and Democracy", 118 Northwestern L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024)
  • "The Perils and Promise of Direct Democracy: Labour Ballot Initiatives in the United States", Kings L. J. (forthcoming 2024)
  • "Beyond the Labor Exemption: Labor’s Antimonopoly Vision and the Fight for Greater Democracy,” in Antimonopoly and American Democracy, edited by Daniel A. Crane and William J. Novak, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 
  • "Labor and Democracy," in Law of Work Handbook, edited by Guy Davidov, Brian Langille & Gillian Lester, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
  • "Strengthening Collective Bargaining in the United States," 3 WSI Mitteilungen,  2023(co-authored with Virginia Doellgast) 
  • "Class, Care, and the Equal Rights Amendment," Colum. J. Gender & Law Online 2 (2022)
  • "Power Struggles - The Tyranny of Merit and the Degradation of Work: Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit," American Journal of Law and Equality 1: 15–19 (2021) 
  • “Ending At-Will Employment: A Guide for Just Cause Reform,” Roosevelt Institute (2021) (co-authored with Alex Hertel-Fernandez)
  • “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality,” 130 YALE L.J. 546 (2021) (co-authored with Benjamin Sachs)
  • “An American Approach to Social Democracy: The Forgotten Promise of the Fair Labor Standards Act,”  128 YALE L.J. 616 (2019) 
  • “Janus’s Two Faces,” SUP. CT. REV. 21 (2019)
  • “Union Rights for All: Toward Sectoral Bargaining in the United States,” in THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK  OF U.S. LABOR LAW: REVIVING AMERICAN LABOR FOR A 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY (Richard Bales & Charlotte Garden eds.) (2019) 
  • “Peril and Possibility: Strikes, Rights, and Legal Change in the Age of Trump,” 40 BERK. J. EMP. & LAB. L.  137 (2019) (invited lecture) 
  • “The Fortification of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine and the Political Economy,” 93 IND. L. J. 5 (2018) (symposium issue)  
  • “Social Bargaining in States and Cities, Labor Law Reform Symposium,” HARV. L. POL’Y REV. ONLINE (2017) 
  • “Confronting Power in Public Law,” 130 HARV. L. REV. F. 1 (2016) 
  • “The New Labor Law,” 126 YALE L. J. 2 (2016) 
  • “Building Labor’s Constitution,” 94 TEX. L. REV. 1591 (2016) (symposium issue) 
  • “Separations of Wealth: Inequality and the Erosion of Checks and Balances,” 18 J. CONST. L. 419 (2015) 
  • “The President’s Enforcement Power,” 88 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1031 (2013)
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