Catherine Fisk

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 2026:

• 210 sec. 001 - Legal Profession
• 227 sec. 001 - Labor Law
• 227.27 sec. 001 - Work Law Colloquium

Courses During Other Semesters

Semester	Course Num	Course Title	Teaching Evaluations
Fall 2025	227.25 sec. 001	California Employment Law	View Teaching Evaluation
Spring 2025	210 sec. 004	Legal Profession	View Teaching Evaluation
	227 sec. 001	Labor Law	View Teaching Evaluation