Michael Fischl

Richard Michael Fischl is Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut.  After graduating cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1978, he spent four years with the Division of Enforcement Litigation at the National Labor Relations Board and a year with the Litigation Unit of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board.  During his time with the NLRB, he was principal author of the agency's successful Supreme Court briefs in NLRB v. Hendricks County REMC and NLRB v. Transportation Management Inc., and he received several commendations for outstanding appellate work from the NLRB's General Counsel.  In 1983, he joined the faculty at the University of Miami, where he taught until his appointment at Connecticut in 2006.  The year of his departure, he was the recipient of Miami's Golden Apple award for outstanding teaching and service.  Professor Fischl's research interests include union organizing and collective bargaining, the individual contract of employment, legal theory, and legal education. He has offered American work law courses as a visiting professor at Yale and Cardozo Law Schools; has taught comparative labor law at University College London and Eberhard-Karls-Universität in Tübingen, Germany; and has lectured widely on labor law topics.  He is co-chair of Intell, an international network of progressive scholars and practitioners that has hosted labor and employment law conferences in the U.S. and in Canterbury, Cape Town, Catania, Cuernavaca, Kyoto, and Toronto.  In 2008-2010, he was Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and is recovering nicely.

Representative Publications

Books

Labor Law in an Era of Globalization: Transformative Practices and Possibilities (with Joanne Conaghan and Karl Klare) (Oxford 2002)

Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams (with Jeremy Paul) (Carolina Academic Press 1999)

Articles, Essays, and Shorter Works

Dignity and Dismissal, 50 J. of Catholic Legal Studies 149, 166-73 (2012) (conference presentation in The Theology of Work and the Dignity of Workers, St. John's University School of Law) < http://www.stjohns.edu/academics/graduate/law/journals_activities/catholiclegalstudies/issue/50_1_2.stj >

"Running the Government Like a Business": Wisconsin and the Assault on Workplace Democracy, 121 Yale L.J. Online 39 (2011)

Labor Law, the Left, and the Lure of the Market, 94 Marq. L. Rev. 947 (2011)

Really Sticky Default Rules, JOTWELL (Dec. 13, 2010) (reviewing Brishen Rogers, Toward Third-Party Liability for Wage Theft, 31 Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L. 1 (Winter 2010))

Pedagogy and Critique: Values and Assumptions in the Law School Classroom, 58 Buff. L. Rev. The Docket 1 (2010)

New Oxford Companion to Law (Peter Cane & Joanne Conaghan, eds.) (Oxford 2008) (author of commissioned entries for Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the Uniform Commercial Code)

The Other Side of the Picket Line: Contract, Democracy, and Power in a Law School Classroom, 31 N.Y.U. Rev. of Law & Soc. Change 517 (2007)

Rethinking the Tripartite Division of American Work Law, 28 Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L. 163 (2007)

A Woman's World: What if care work were socialized and police & fire protection left to individual families?, 52 Buff. L. Rev. 659 (2004); the essay also appears as the concluding chapter in Women, Work, and Globalization: Critical and Comparative Perspectives (Joanne Conaghan & Kerry Rittich, eds.) (Oxford 2005)

Recent Courses

Contracts

Work Law

Readings in Contemporary Labor Law Scholarship

Work, Workers, and American Film

The Canon of American Legal Thought (with Prof. Mason)