Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley
I teach and write on the law of work, the legal profession, civil liberties and civil procedure.
I am the faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work, which fosters policy-relevant and cross-disciplinary scholarship, student engagement, and community involvement to address emerging labor and employment issues facing all Californians.
My pro bono public service includes testimony in Congress and the California legislature and briefing and arguing cases in California and federal circuit courts. I also serve on the boards of directors of nonprofit organizations that provide legal representation to workers and on the ethics review board for a major international union. I also serve as an arbitrator under collective bargaining agreements in diverse sectors. In the academy, I have frequently chaired committees to select books and articles for awards of the American Society for Legal History, the Law & Society Association, and the Association of American Law Schools.
Before joining the Berkeley faculty, I was a member of the founding faculty of UC Irvine Law School, and on the faculty of Duke Law School, the University of Southern California Law School, and Loyola Law School. I was a civil appellate lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice and practiced at a boutique Washington, D.C. firm. I clerked for Judge William Norris on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. I graduated Order of the Coif from Berkeley Law, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University.
Scholarship
Some of my writing examines legal doctrine and speaks primarily to lawyers, judges, legislators, and legal scholars interested in law as a tool for reform. Recent publications in this strand include Democracy and a Nonpartisan Civil Service, 67 Arizona Law Review 629 (2025), Free Speech at Work, in the Oxford Handbook on the Law of Work (Oxford 2024), Independent Contractors and the ABCs of Contract Law, 66 Arizona Law Review 607 (2024) (with H. Dagan), Compelled Disclosure and the Workplace Rights It Enables, 97 Indiana Law Journal 1025 (2022), After Janus, 107 California Law Review 1821 (2019) (with M. Malin), and Police Unions, 85 George Washington Law Review 712 (2017) (with S. Richardson).
I also write for law students and law teachers. I published the first (and so far only) casebook on California employment law: California Employment Law (2025) and have co-authored two other casebooks, The Legal Profession: Ethics in Contemporary Practice (West 3d ed. 2024) (with A. Southworth), and Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace (West) (with Dau-Schmidt et al).
I am a legal historian as well as a lawyer. In have published two books of legal history: Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (Harvard University Press 2016), and Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press 2009). The latter won prizes from the American Historical Association and the American Society of Legal History. My third monograph on legal history is No Neutrals: Radical Lawyers for the 20th Century Labor Movement and is under contract with Cambridge University Press. Recent articles in this strand of my work include Jewish Lawyers and the Labor Movement, 93 Fordham Law Review 1159 (2025), The Fragility of Labor Relations in American Theatre, 83 Ohio State Law Journal 217 (2022) (with B. Salter), and “People Crushed by Law Have No hopes But from Power”: Free Speech and Protest in the 1940s, 39 Law and History Review 173 (2021); and [my favorite title] and &: Law __ Society in Historical Legal Research, in Oxford Handbook of Legal Historical Research (2018).
I also draw from diverse sociolegal methods to understand the evolution and impact of law. Works in this vein include Diminishing Returns? Predicting Plaintiff Success in Federal Disability Discrimination in Employment Cases 1979-2018, forthcoming 2027 in the New York University Law Review, and Disputed and Disfavored: Pain, Mental Illness, and Invisible Conditions in Disability Discrimination Cases, Social Science Medicine (2005) (both with Krieger, Best, Reddy & Fang), and Story Work: Non-Proprietary Autonomy and Contemporary Television Writing, 18 Television and New Media 6015 (2016) (with M. Szalay).
