The Hill Op-Ed: As Hurricanes Expose Inequalities, Civil Courts May Be 'Great Equalizer'

Martha T. McCluskey is a Professor and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York, in Buffalo, New York.

Professor McCluskey's teaching has included courses on constitutional law, torts, insurance, regulation, economic inequality, and the relationships between work and family. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School and a J.S.D. with distinction from Columbia Law School. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Before entering academia she was an attorney for the Maine Public Advocate Office, focusing on the regulation of workers’ compensation insurance and public utilities.

Professor McCluskey’s scholarship focuses on the relationship between economics and inequality in law. She has written extensively on how economic ideas and economic influences have shaped social welfare programs, regulatory policy, and contemporary legal theory. She is working on a book project titled A Field Guide to Law, Economics and Justice. Earlier publications include a major study of workers’ compensation reform laws, several articles analyzing workers’ compensation insurance regulation, and a number of articles on welfare policy and social citizenship.

Much of her work explores the connections between economics and feminist legal theory, focusing especially on the impact of economic ideology on gender equity. This work has included analysis of the legal treatment of work and family caretaking in a range of policy arenas, including welfare reform, social insurance, international trade and development policy, and income tax law. As a participant in events sponsored by Emory University’s project on Vulnerability and the Human Condition, she is part of an interdisciplinary effort to re-examine the classic liberal ideal of individual autonomy as a foundational principle of law and policy, and to shift the focus to human interdependence and to questions of power and privilege in distributing institutional support for human vulnerabilities. She is the co-editor, with Emory University Professor Martha A. Fineman, of Feminism, Media, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Another strand of her work applies her focus on equality and economics to disability law, including both benefit systems such as workers’ compensation and antidiscrimination doctrine. This work examines how disability fits within but also reshapes theories of equality based on race, gender, sexuality, and economic class.

Professor McCluskey’s writing has also examined economic inequality in constitutional law, not just as a question of equal protection but in ideas about due process. Finally, she has written several articles on the contemporary influence of economic politics and ideologically driven funding on legal theory and scholarship.

In addition to her writing, she is a co-organizer of the ClassCrits project, which brings together scholars in law, economics, and other disciplines to develop a critical legal analysis of economic inequality through workshops, conference panels, scholarly publications, and a blog, at www.classcrits.org. She is also a member of the Society of American Law Teachers, the American Constitution Society, the National Lawyers Guild, and a frequent participant in the LatCrit scholarly community.

Martha T. McCluskey
University at Buffalo Law School
The State University of New York
716.645.2326
email
website
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Sidney A. Shapiro holds the Fletcher Chair in Administrative Law at the Wake Forest University School of Law and is the Associate Dean for Research and Development. He is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Progressive Reform.

Professor Shapiro has taught and written in the areas of Administrative Law, Regulatory Law and Policy, Environmental Policy, and Occupational Safety and Health Law for 25 years.

While in academia, Shapiro has served as a consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress (OTA), and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). With Professor Thomas O. McGarity, Professor Shapiro designed and helped initiate a rulemaking prioritization process for OSHA rulemaking during the early 1990s. As a consultant to OTA, Professor Shapiro assessed various regulatory tools or options that agencies can use to implement regulation. As a consultant to ACUS, Professor Shapiro studied the efficacy of the regulatory process at EPA (noise control), OSHA, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Professor Shapiro began his legal career as a trial attorney in the Bureau of Competition of the Federal Trade Commission and later worked as the Deputy Legal Counsel, Secretary's Review Panel on New Drug Regulation at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Professor Shapiro has published widely in the areas of regulatory law and policy. He co-authored The People’s Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special Interests, Government, and Threats to Health, Safety, and the Environment, with CPR President, Rena Steinzor. This book reviewed years of government actions and inactions leading to the decline of the five protector agencies. His book, Risk Regulation at Risk: Restoring a Pragmatic Approach, analyzes health and safety and environmental protection laws and policy, and argues for a pragmatic approach to policy in these areas instead of using economic analysis to set regulatory goals. Workers at Risk, co-authored with Thomas O. McGarity, describes rulemaking, implementation and enforcement in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from its inception in 1970 through 1990. The book analyzes OSHA's strengths and weaknesses and makes many recommendations for improving standard-setting and enforcement. Shapiro's casebook, Administrative Law and Procedure: A Problem Approach, co-authored with William Funk and Russell Weaver, is used in administrative law courses at law schools throughout the country. His casebook, Regulatory Policy and Law, is the first of its kind, and is used to train lawyers to evaluate and advocate for public policy.

Professor Shapiro has published dozens of articles on regulatory policy, health and safety laws, environmental law and administrative law in prominent law reviews, such as the Harvard Law Review, Duke Law Journal and the Wake Forest Law Review, as well as in specialty journals, such as the Administrative Law Review and the Ecology Law Quarterly.

Professor Shapiro has been an active participant in efforts to improve health, safety and environmental quality in the United States. He has testified before congressional committees on administrative law and occupational safety and health issues. He has worked with various public interest groups in advisory and support capacities, including Public Citizen Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen Congress Watch, and OMB Watch. 

Sidney Shapiro
Wake Forest University School of Law
Winston-Salem, NC
336.758.7320
email
website