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Kate Griffith

People/Faculty
Jean McKelvey-Alice Grant Professor of Labor-Management Relations
Global Labor and Work
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Diversity, and Faculty Development
Global Labor and Work
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Overview

Griffith is the Jean McKelvey-Alice Grant Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Diversity, and Faculty Development at Cornell's ILR School. She is also an associate member of the Cornell Law Faculty. A Research Fellow affiliated with NYU’s Center for Labor & Employment Law, Griffith's scholarship focuses primarily on the intersection of immigration and workplace law and legal issues affecting low-wage workers. She is a co-author (along with Harper and Estreicher) of the textbook Labor Law: Cases, Materials, and Problems (9th Edition, 2021). She has published in the California Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, and the Law & Social Inquiry Journal, among others. She has received Cornell ILR MacIntyre Awards for Exemplary Teaching (2010 & 2015), a Robert Stern Award for Teaching and Mentoring (2019) and has been selected four times as the Most Influential Faculty Member by Merrill Presidential Scholars. In 2018, Griffith was named a Stephen H. Weiss Junior Fellow, Cornell's highest teaching award for Associate Professors.

Griffith joined Cornell in the Fall of 2007 after completing a Skadden Fellowship as a Staff Attorney at the Workers’ Rights Law Center of New York, Inc. in New York’s Hudson Valley. Prior to the Skadden Fellowship, Griffith served as a Law Clerk for the Honorable Rosemary S. Pooler in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She is a cum laude graduate of NYU School of Law, where she was a Root Tilden Public Interest Scholar, received the Sol D. Kapelsohn Prize for highest excellence in writing in the field of labor law and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change. Before earning her J.D. from NYU, Griffith conducted research on women workers and labor law in Mexico as a Rotary Scholar and in El Salvador as a Fulbright Scholar.

Areas of Expertise

Employment law and policy
Immigration and the Labor Force
International and Comparative Workplace Studies
Labor law
Labor rights
Rights of working people

Other expertise

Wage and Hour Law, Intersection of Immigration Law & Labor and Employment Law

Publications

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

Textbooks

  • , , & . . Labor Law: Cases and Materials (9th Edition). Aspen.
  • , , & . . Labor Law: Selected Statutes, Forms and Agreements (9th Edition).
  • , , & . . Labor Law: Cases, Materials, and Problems (8th Edition). Aspen.
  • , , & . . Labor Law: Selected Statutes, Forms and Agreements (8th Edition). Aspen.

Newspapers

  • . . Protecting Immigrant Workers' Rights. Daily Journal.

Books

  • . . Who is an Employee and Who is the Employer?: Proceedings of the NYU 68th Annual Conference on Labor. LexisNexis.

Instructor's Manuals

  • . . Teacher's Manual, for Labor Law: Cases, Material, and Problems (2015).

Professional activities

  • “Employers as Subjects of the Immigration State: How the State Foments Employment Insecurity for Temporary Immigrant Workers.” (with Kate Griffith). 2020.
  • Immigration Status and the Nature of Low-Wage Work in the U.S.. 2020.
  • Workers with Temporary Protected Status: The Value and Limits of Delinking Immigration and Employment Status. Presented to U.C. Davis School of Law. 2018.