Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T18:19:19.563Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Laurie Edelman: Scholarship and mentorship in action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Brent K. Nakamura*
Affiliation:
United States Department of Justice, San Francisco, California, United States

Extract

My last email to Laurie Edelman, sent in September 2022, forwarded a Tenth Circuit Judicial Council Order discussing allegations against a District of New Mexico magistrate judge related to a special committee's finding that it “had reason to believe that she had engaged in sanctionable misconduct.” In letting Laurie know that this was “piece of evidence 1,000,001” that she had long “been so very correct” in her scholarship, I noted that the Order had found that many of the magistrate judge's employees chose not to report the conduct “because they feared retaliation” and still others “did not know if her behavior would constitute abusive conduct or a hostile work environment.” This was exactly what her scholarship has always described as two significant weak points in the enforcement of employment discrimination law and the realization of a fair and equitable workplace (Edelman 2016). In my mind, this September 2022 email epitomized what I had come to know—first as Laurie's former graduate student and research assistant, and now as a practicing lawyer—that Laurie was right. Her theories about endogeneity, symbolic structures, and the challenges of enforcing regulatory laws had broad applicability and this was just another instance of how, in practice, her theories and predictions proved to correctly identify real-world problems.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 In re: Complaint Under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, Judicial Counsel of the Tenth Circuit, No. 10-21-90022 (10th Cir. Sept. 14, 2022) at 2–3.

2 Id. at 6.

3 Lauren B. Edelman, Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016) at 21, 158–59.

4 Lauren B. Edelman, Linda Hamilton Krieger, Scott R. Eliason, Catherine R. Albiston, Virginia Mellema, When Organizations Rule: Judicial Deference to Institutionalized Employment Structures, 117 American Journal of Sociology (2011).

5 Calvin Morrill, Lauren B. Edelman, Karolyn Tyson, and Richard Arum, Legal Mobilitization in Schools: The Paradox of Rights and Race among Youth 44 Law & Society Review (2010): 651–694.

6 Lauren B. Edelman, Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016).

7 Lauren B. Edelman, Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016) at 226.

8 Lauren B. Edelman, Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016) at 220–21.

9 Lauren B. Edelman, Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016) at 5.

10 Brent K. Nakamura and Lauren B. Edelman, Bakke at 40: How Diversity Matters in the Employment Context, 52 U.C. Davis Law Review (2018): 2627–679.