Scrutinizing the Workplace and Regulatory Enforcement

New assistant professor uses her empirical skills to examine legal policy.

Photo: Steve Gladfelter

As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Alison Morantz wrote her senior honors thesis on failed school desegregation efforts in Missouri. Hailing from just across the state line in Kansas, Morantz examined the decline of Kansas City's beleaguered school district in the 1980s and 1990s, despite the infusion of more than a billion dollars in state funds. "To me, Kansas City is a tragic story," she said. "It just breaks your heart to see what happened there, especially considering the incredible promise and idealism early on."

Since embarking on that research project 12 years ago, Morantz has devoted herself to empirical studies on the real-world effects of legal and policy reform. Now an expert in employment, labor, and regulatory enforcement, the 33-year-old lawyer and economist brings her expertise to Stanford Law School this fall as an assistant professor.

Morantz, a Rhodes Scholar who concurrently earned a JD from Yale and a PhD in economics from Harvard, says she is eager to share with students her experiences as a union-side labor lawyer and antidiscrimination advocate at Pyle, Rome, Lichten & Ehrenberg in Boston.

One of Morantz's current research projects focuses on the impact of devolving occupational safety and health regulation from the federal government to state governments. Meanwhile, through a grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Morantz and Professor David Weil of Boston University have begun trying to put regulatory theory into practice by exploring ways to improve OSHA's enforcement methods in the construction industry.

Morantz also is looking at the significance of homestead exemption law, a 19th-century innovation that brought into question the definitions of "family" and "head of household" in the wake of the Civil War. "The postbellum development of homestead exemption jurisprudence was a defining moment in the evolution of both family law and early social welfare policy," she said. "Many of the ideological tensions that bedeviled judicial attempts to implement these laws foreshadow current debates about the state's proper role in promoting nuclear families and alleviating economic dependency."

—Nina Nowak