Catherine Fisk teaches Employment Law, Labor Law, Civil Procedure, and Understanding the U.S. Legal Profession. She is a Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.
Professor Fisk is the author of several books. Her first, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009, 2014), won prizes from the American Society for Legal History and the American Historical Association. In her next book, Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (Harvard University Press, 2016), Fisk explored the law and norms of credit and compensation for writing, contrasting the writer-protective rules negotiated by unionized writers in film and TV with far less protective norms developed in non-union advertising. Fisk is the co-author of four books for use in law school and legal studies classes: Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace (3d ed. 2019), The Legal Profession: Ethics in Contemporary Practice (2d ed. 2019), What Lawyers Do: Understanding the Many American Legal Practices (2020), and Labor Law Stories (2005). Her next book will examine the professional identities of lawyers who represented activist, multi-racial, and politically progressive unions in the mid-twentieth century.
Fisk has published over 100 articles and essays in leading publications including, most recently, California Law Review, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, Harvard Law Review Forum, Yale Law Journal Forum, Law and History Review, Ohio State Law Journal, and Indiana Law Journal. Her recent articles address the intersection of antitrust, labor, and copyright law in structuring labor relations in American theatre, the crafting of New Deal era labor and social welfare legislation, social movement lawyering, free speech rights of worker organizations and in the workplace, new forms of labor organizing, and police unions.
Professor Fisk’s current public service and pro bono legal work includes filing amicus briefs on various labor and employment law issues, service on the Advisory Board of the Berkeley Labor Center, the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History and the boards of directors of two Bay Area workers’ rights nonprofits, and occasional service as an arbitrator under collectively bargained labor contracts. Before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2017, she was on the law faculties at UC Irvine, Duke University, the University of Southern California, and Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. Prior to entering academia, Fisk practiced civil appellate litigation and union-side labor law in Washington, D.C., and clerked on the Ninth Circuit. Fisk received an AB summa cum laude from Princeton University and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was elected to Order of the Coif.
Education
AB, Princeton University (1983)
JD, University of California, Berkeley (1986)
LLM, University of Wisconsin (1995)
Catherine Laura Fisk is not teaching any Law courses in Spring 2024.
Courses During Other Semesters
| Semester | Course Num | Course Title |  Teaching Evaluations | Fall 2023 | 200F sec. 003 | Civil Procedure | View Teaching Evaluation | Spring 2023 | 211.11 sec. 001 | Understanding the U.S. Legal Profession | View Teaching Evaluation | 227 sec. 001 | Labor Law | View Teaching Evaluation | 227.32 sec. 001 | Current Issues in Work Law | View Teaching Evaluation |
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Flight Attendant Case Tests If State Labor Laws Trump FAA Rules
One reason the case is so important to airlines is that they are likely to get a more pro-business outcome in the Supreme Court than with California’s lawmakers, Professor Catherine Fisk says. “The usual way of dealing with a policy disagreement is to get the legislature to enact a law,” she says. “What’s significant here is apparently the airlines couldn’t persuade the California legislature.”
Drivers Accuse Uber and Lyft of Price-Fixing, Antitrust Violations in Attempt at Class-Action Lawsuit
Professor Catherine Fisk says “illustrates how the companies get all the benefits of wage and price control that they would have if drivers were employees while none of the responsibility.”
Starbucks Threatens Trans Benefits in Anti-Union Push, Staff Say
Companies often push or ignore the boundaries about what they can tell staff, since the National Labor Relations Board has no power to punish them, Professor Catherine Fisk says. “They’ll spend a few million dollars litigating it, but that’s less than the millions more they presumably think they’ll have to pay if they were unionized.”
Escalation of the Supreme Court’s leak probe puts clerks in a ‘no-win’ situation
Professor Catherine Fisk discusses the Supreme Court’s efforts to force clerks to hand over their phone records and suggests the clerks respond as a group and decline to act until they consult with counsel
‘Trust isn’t built by just one policy.’ Abortion care rights in the workplace are complicated
Professor Catherine Fisk, Faculty Director of the Center for Law & Work, addresses employee privacy concerns as a growing number of tech companies extend abortion-related travel benefits
Turn the Page: A Prolific Year of Powerful and Pathbreaking Books from Berkeley Law’s Faculty
A recent celebration of 39 works that probe compelling issues across and beyond the legal landscape highlights the faculty’s far-reaching expertise.
Who is responsible when a gig worker, such as an Uber driver, is killed on the job?
Professor Catherine Fisk says more needs to be done to protect gig workers and their families
Ask Help Desk: What happens if you refuse to go back to the office?
Professor Catherine Fisk explores the leverage workers and employers have when it comes to a return-to-the-office policy
When Gig Workers Are Murdered, Their Families Foot the Bill
Professor Catherine Fisk explains the lack of coverage gig workers and their families have when people are killed on the job and the cost-saving measures companies like Uber take to exclude their drivers from workers’ compensation
Staten Island Amazon workers chart their own path in union drive
Professor Catherine Fisk, Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, compares labor organizers at Amazon’s Staten Island facility to General Motors organizers in 1944
Inside ‘contract hell’: Esports players say predatory contracts run ‘rampant’
Professor Catherine Fisk says she sees esports as currently living through what Major League Baseball experienced 80 years ago with “exploitative contracts”
Tesla Warns of Possible California Suit Over Race Harassment
Professor Catherine Fisk discusses a potential racial harassment suit against Tesla
Column: California has an answer for worker abuse in the fast-food industry
A recent brief authored by Professor Catherine Fisk and 3L Amy Reavis observes that powerful global corporations like McDonald’s control the prices, quality, hours, and other operations, and the franchisee has no way to increase profits other than cutting labor costs
A solution to health, safety and labor problems in fast food
Professor Catherine Fisk discusses how in an effort to support and protect essential workers and small businesses, California has introduced the FAST Recovery Act which ensures shared responsibility between franchisors and franchisees for legal compliance
Manchin’s incorrect claim of a 232-year filibuster ‘tradition’
Senator Manchin’s claims about the filibuster are debunked by a 1997 Stanford Law Review article by Professor Catherine Fisk and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky examining the history of the filibuster
An Afghan refugee was shot and killed while driving for Uber in SF. His family is demanding better.
Professor Catherine Fisk comments on the liability of Uber in the shooting death of a driver in San Francisco under Prop 22, which has been deemed unconstitutional, but remains in effect
Planned Parenthood L.A. was hacked. What it means, and what you can do
Professor Catherine Fisk, in light of the recent hacking of Planned Parenthood, inputs that although some women might be worried about their jobs, there are laws that protect employees from retaliation for engaging in lawful off-duty behavior
Op-Ed: At the Academy Museum, Hollywood’s own labor history is left unexamined
Professor Catherine Fisk says filmmaking was the original gig economy, and reflecting on how the movie business dealt with solving problems of pay and portable benefits provides lessons for today
Farmworkers may be able to vote at home in union elections
Professor Catherine Fisk discusses a California bill that would give farmworkers more ways to vote in union elections
Prop. 22 is ruled unconstitutional: What it means, how apps reacted and what happens next
Professor Catherine Fisk says the fight over Prop 22 isn’t over – after consideration by the state court of appeals, it will eventually be decided by the California Supreme Court