Anne M. Lofaso

Lofaso studied at Somerville College, Oxford for her DPhil in Law.[2] In 1996, Lofaso served as a lecturer for St. Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, where she gave tutorials to law students in British labour law and employment discrimination law. In August 2001, Lofaso began teaching comparative and international work law and appellate advocacy as an adjunct professor at American University Washington College of Law. Later, she moved into full-time academia as an associate professor and was promoted to professor in 2011. Dean Joyce McConnell appointed Lofaso to the position of Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, effective July 1, 2011.[1] In early 2011, Lofaso became a researcher for the Employment Policy Research Network. In 2015, Lofaso was appointed a leadership research fellow in Arts and Humanities at the Office of the Associate Vice President for Creative and Scholarly Activity at West Virginia University.[3] She returned to Oxford University as a Senior Academic Visitor with the Faculty of Law and as a Keeley Visiting Fellow to Wadham College, University of Oxford for the 2016 academic year.[3] While at Oxford, she worked on a labor law monograph, The Once and Future Worker.[4] Additionally, she is the "Arthur B. Hodges Professor of Law,"[5] an endowed chair at West Virginia University, College of Law.[6]

Lofaso has spent the past fifteen years developing a jurisprudential basis for workers’ rights. In her view, workers’ rights must be grounded in two values: autonomy and dignity. In her first tenure piece, Toward a Foundational Theory of Workers’ Rights: The Autonomous Dignified Worker, published in the University of Missouri Law Review, Lofaso began to build that foundational theory.[7] Lofaso draws on Raz’s theory of autonomy—to become part author of one’s life—and on Dworkin’s theory of dignity to argue that workplace laws should reflect those values. In Lofaso’s view, although government is typically the most coercive force in most people’s lives, the accumulation of private power is a close second. Accordingly, the law should play a role in protecting workers from those coercive forces (thereby promoting the autonomy and dignity of working-class people) by encouraging concerted activities for the purpose of mutual aid. The practice of collective bargaining is, for example, one way of liberating the working and middle classes. Lofaso continues that theme in a recent article, In Defense of Public Sector Unions, published in the Hofstra Law Review.[8] There she defends the role that public and private-sector unions play not only in liberating the working classes, but also in educating working-class people in how to be model citizens who can participate in a democracy. By contrast, Lofaso views the accumulation of economic power in the private sector as threatening a well-functioning democracy.

In September Massacre, a white paper published by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy,[9] and a recent article, The Persistence of Union Repression in an Era of Recognition, published in the Maine Law Review,[10] Lofaso continues the theme of government and private sources of coercing working-class people. Lofaso exposes the coercive force of government, which she contends has narrowed the rights of working people in the post-New-Deal era in partial response to the pressure exerted by the private sector. Lofaso continues that theme in her article, The Vanishing Employee, published by the Florida International Law Review, by showing how each branch of government has contributed to eroding workers’ rights primarily by narrowing the statutory definition of protected employees.[11]

Lofaso is married to Jim Heiko, a statistician.[12] She is also the great-granddaughter of the American playwright and composer, George M. Cohan.[13]

• WVU College of Law, Lofaso Faculty Page