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’s scholarship has appeared in many leading law reviews. Her recent works explore innovative ways to improve labor standards, labor and social movement lawyering, free speech at and about work, and reforming police labor relations.
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 teaching the following courses in Spring 2025:
• 210 sec. 004 - Legal Profession
• 227 sec. 001 - Labor Law
Courses During Other Semesters
| Semester | Course Num | Course Title |  Teaching Evaluations | Fall 2025 | 227.25 sec. 001 | California Employment Law | Fall 2024 | 200F sec. 002 | Civil Procedure |
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Meta’s Efforts to Block Explosive Expose in Arbitration Likely to Fail, Labor Experts Say
Arbitration is commonly understood to favor employers over employees, but “an arbitrator cannot violate the law,” said Catherine Fisk of UC Berkeley’s Law School, where she teaches employment and labor law.
Musk’s Costly Cuts at X: Will DOGE and Trump Face Similar Fallout?
“When employees have job rights, as most federal employees do, they cannot be summarily fired without cause.” Catherine Fisk of UC Berkeley’s Law School wrote KQED. “Most federal civilian employees are protected by civil service laws that require the government to have just cause and to follow fair procedure to terminate them. That is true even when the government seeks to lay off employees for reasons of cost.”
UC Berkeley Law Rankings Hit High Marks for Major Fields and Scholarly Impact of Standout Professors
UC Berkeley Law is the top public law school in the United States — and sixth in the world — according to Times Higher Education’s new rankings, and two recent studies of scholarly impact also place its faculty as the best among public institutions.
California wanted state workers back in the office. Here’s how many have returned
Professor Catherine Fisk weighs in on Governor Gavin Newsom’s return to the office directive for public employees.
Law is fuzzy when it comes to employer’s ability to search employee emails
UC Berkeley School of Law professor Catherine Fisk said that an employer’s intention when reviewing an employee’s email is key to determining whether a violation has occurred. If an employer reviewed a staffer’s email while they were on vacation to offload work to someone else, Fisk said, that type of search may be justified. But searching an employee’s email simply to surveil them probably would not be, she said.
US union organizing, and unions’ election win rate, is surging, NLRB says
Catherine Fisk, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said public support for unions is at its highest levels since the 1960s. Coupled with recent actions by the NLRB that boost union organizing, those positive attitudes about unions embolden workers to form them, whether on their own as thousands of Starbucks workers have since 2021 or by teaming up with established unions like Volkswagen employees in Tennessee who recently voted to join the United Auto Workers, she said.
Elon Musk is suing to stop the government from enforcing labor laws. The Supreme Court might agree with him
“This is an effort by a group of lawyers who are foes of the administrative state and the New Deal-era legislation that created the NLRB and the SEC to essentially end enforcement of those statutes,” says Catherine Fisk, an employment and labor law authority at UC Berkeley law school.
What a Year for Labor!
Host Elizabeth Binczik speaks with Professor Catherine Fisk about the combination of labor wins this year and what 2023 could mean for labor moving forward.
How San Francisco police pay — plus overtime — compares with other city workers
“The power of police is not just that they have guns and have a high degree of solidarity in their unions,” said UC Berkeley law Professor Catherine Fisk. “The power is the political threat that elected officials feel.”
GOP Senators Push for Child Labor Bills in Rare Bipartisan Move
“There’s only so much the administration can do without action from Congress,” said Catherine L. Fisk, professor of labor and employment law at Berkeley Law. “Expanding the liability chain for businesses that have illegal child labor present in their supply chains would be the best way to tackle the crisis.”
A Berkeley Law Prof Shows How To Solve Child Labor Crisis
Professor Catherine Fisk, a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work, talks with Law360 about why she thinks stronger laws are crucial and a moral imperative.
Employers Downplay the ‘D’ in DEI Programs to Avoid Lawsuits
“Changing the language of a program by itself is not enough to avoid litigation and the design of DEI programs must make clear that there is no racial, gender, religious, or national origin exclusion,” said Professor Catherine Fisk..
Labor Trailblazer’s Call to Action Inspires Students at Center for Law and Work’s Kickoff Event
A full crowd hears about the push to strengthen unions and the surging labor movement from Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, chief officer of the 2.1 million-member California Labor Federation.
Whole Foods Cites Web Designer’s Supreme Court Win in Fight Against BLM Masks
“The court opened the door to arguments like Whole Foods’,” said University of California at Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk. “I expect we will see a lot more.”
Welterweight Champ Crawford Calls For Professional Boxers Union
Negotiating collectively could help boxers reap the benefits that other professional sports players have long enjoyed, said Catherine Fisk, an employment and labor law professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law
What’s at Stake in the Hollywood Writers’ Strike
“Streaming has given the studios one more way to exploit writers—and the writers are pushing back,” writes Catherine L. Fisk, faculty director of Berkeley Law’s Center for Law and Work.
Opinion: Employers can now sue unions over strikes. Here’s how that will intimidate workers
“The National Labor Relations Act was intended to provide clarity and solid ground on which employees and employers could resolve their differences,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Catherine Fisk. “With Thursday’s ruling, the justices have done the opposite, and workers will pay the price.”
‘No Reward for Loyalty’: Gig Companies Winning Fight to Classify Drivers as Independent
“No question there are a lot of minimum labor law standards in California, and I understand why employers find them onerous to comply with, not to mention expensive,” said UC Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a group of California labor and employment law professors opposed to Prop. 22. She added that she’s “disappointed” by the appeals court decision.
Independent Contractor Rulings Sharpen Issue of Who Is and Isn’t
Professor of Law Catherine Fisk discusses California’s Prop. 22 and Assembly Bill No. 5.
Opinion: Reopening Uber’s challenge to California labor law is just the beginning
“For decades, conservatives have preached judicial restraint and deference to the political process, write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Catherine Fisk of Berkeley Law. “But that doesn’t seem to apply when they don’t like government regulation of business. They will surely use the 9th Circuit’s new decision and its fallacious reasoning to challenge a myriad of essential regulations needed to protect workers and consumers.”