Faculty Profiles
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Catherine Albiston
Title: Professor of Law
Office: 2240 Piedmont Avenue
Tel: 510-642-0493
Fax: 510-642-2951
Email Address: calbiston@law.berkeley.edu
Catherine Albiston joined the Boalt Hall faculty in 2003. She teaches primarily in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program, an interdisciplinary doctoral program focused on the study of legal and political institutions through the perspectives and methods of economics, history, sociology, political science, and philosophy. Albiston's legal expertise is in employment law, with an emphasis on gender and work/family policy.
Following law school, Albiston clerked for Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California and practiced law at the Employment Law Center, a project of the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco. From 1995 to 1997, she held a Skadden Fellowship and litigated some of the first federal cases brought under the Family and Medical Leave Act. After completing her Ph.D., Albiston joined the law faculty at the University of Wisconsin, where she also held affiliate appointments in Sociology and Women's Studies. In 2005, she was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Law & Society Association.
Albiston's research addresses the relationship between law and social change through a variety of empirical projects. She is currently completing a book that examines how social institutions affect rights mobilization in the workplace and in the courts. She is also conducting an empirical study of how legal institutions and funding patterns shape variation in strategy, structure, and mission among more than 200 public interest law organizations in the United States. In 2002, her work won the Law & Society Association Dissertation Prize, and she received honorable mention for the Law & Society Association Article Prize in 2001 and again in 2007.
Albiston's recent articles include "Institutional Perspectives on Law, Work, and Family" in Annual Review of Law & Social Science, "The Procedural Attack on Civil Rights: The Empirical Reality of Buckhannon for the Private Attorney General" in UCLA Law Review (with Nielsen 2007), "The Organization of Public Interest Practice: 1975-2004" in North Carolina Law Review (with Nielsen, 2006), "Legal Consciousness and Workplace Rights" in New Civil Rights Research: A Constitutive Approach (2006), "Anti-essentialism and the Work/Family Dilemma" in Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice (2005), "Bargaining in the Shadow of Social Institutions: Competing Discourses and Social Change in Workplace Mobilization of Civil Rights," in Law & Society Review (2005), "Mobilizing Employment Rights in the Workplace" in Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research: Rights and Realities (2005), and "The Rule of Law and the Litigation Process: The Paradox of Losing by Winning," in Law & Society Review (1999).
Education:
B.A., Stanford University (1987)M.A., Stanford University (1989)
J.D., UC Berkeley (Boalt Hall) (1993)
Ph.D., UC Berkeley (2001)
