Associate Professor of Law and McHale Faculty Research Scholar Hiba Hafiz will join Princeton’s University Center for Human Values as their Law and Normative Thinking Fellow in the 2025-2026 academic year. She will focus on completing her book-length manuscript project, titled Unfree Labor: The Legal Geography of Work, and contributing to the University Center for Human Values’ interdisciplinary intellectual life.
Hafiz’s intent is to better understand, as she puts it, “how we’ve gotten to a place where a lot of … rural and distressed communities are deeply oligarchic. They have highly decentralized, highly privatized, highly deregulated communities where all the decisions that are made around collective governance really do turn on who has the highest concentration of private power.”
Her previous research on these issues includes an article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review that outlined the failures of federal regulation in generating geographic labor market inequality. It launched her in-depth research into regional inequality and state and local governance failures that have contributed to what she considers unprecedented geographic divergence.
With a longstanding career as a teacher and scholar, Hafiz has devoted her professional life researching and advising policymakers on solutions to the decline of worker power and rising inequality in the United States. In addition to her work in labor and employment law, she has conducted research and writing in antitrust law and administrative law, outlining a “whole-of-government” approach to retooling public and private enforcement to strengthen workers’ bargaining leverage in the employment bargain.
Hafiz’s Princeton fellowship was open to practitioners, faculty members of any discipline, and independent scholars interested in law and normative inquiry. Participants are expected to reside in or around Princeton, and dedicate the year to researching, discussing, and collaborating with other scholars on their approved project of their choice. They are also asked to engage in a weekly seminar of the Program in Law and Normative Thinking, as well as spend time mentoring JD/PhD students who attend the seminar.
Previously, Hafiz was invited to serve as a policy advisor on labor and antitrust policy in President Joseph Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, and as an Expert Advisor on Labor Competition to the Federal Trade Commission from October 2022 and October 2023. She has published in University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Michigan Law Review, among other esteemed law journals. Currently, she serves as an affiliate fellow at Yale University’s Thurman Arnold Project as well as the Roosevelt Institute, and teaches and writes in labor and employment law, antitrust law, and administrative law.