Seema N. Patel

Bio

Professor Patel’s research and scholarship cover a wide range of fields, from work law and technology, social movements, employment law, and labor law to state and local government law and administrative law. Combining legal analysis with qualitative research methodologies, her research captures the economic and socio-legal needs of low-wage workers, including the human dynamics of the state-worker relationship, the effect of workplace technological developments on economic policy and the workforce, and the role of institutional and individual actors in that project. Drawing on her years of litigation, policy advocacy, organizing, and teaching experience, including extensive collaboration with workers, labor unions, and worker centers, Professor Patel’s research informs critical interventions that address the rapidly changing landscape of work law. Her work has been published in California Law Review, Harvard Law & Policy Review, and the Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law (BJELL).

Professor Patel earned her J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, and her B.A. from UC Berkeley, where she completed a Triple Major in Political Science, Rhetoric, and German. She recently served as a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School and a Practitioner in Residence at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Prior to that, Professor Patel served as the Clinical Director for the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), where she oversaw Berkeley Law’s eight community-based clinics and taught Community Lawyering. At Berkeley Law, she taught Movement Lawyering and Love, Lawyering & Liberation. At UC Law SF, her course offerings include Movement Lawyering; Work Law; Employment Law; and Employment Discrimination.

Before entering legal academia, Professor Patel worked for a decade in the public sector as the inaugural Deputy Director of San Francisco’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement; Senior Advisor to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI) during the Obama administration; and as an Appellate Litigator, and later Trial Attorney, at the Office of the Solicitor, U.S. Department of Labor. Professor Patel clerked for the Honorable Andre M. Davis, U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland (later, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit); and for the Honorable Harry Pregerson, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Following the clerkships, Professor Patel moved to Gujarat, India, to organize slum-dwelling “ragpickers” (trash collectors) into a cooperative society, working alongside them to obtain state recognition as municipal workers. Prior to law school, she organized South Asian immigrant laundry workers on the east coast.

Professor Patel was recently awarded the California Law Review Alumni of the Year Award (2023); the Dale Minami Berkeley Law Alumni Fellowship Award (2022); and the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Public Scholar Faculty Fellowship (2021-22).

Education

• University of California, Berkeley School of Law
  J.D. 2006

• University of California, Berkeley
  B.A., (Political Science, Rhetoric, & German, Triple Major) 2000