Professor Ziaja joins Chicago-Kent from the University of Baltimore as the interim director of the Malin Institute for Law and the Workplace, as well as the faculty advisor for the Labor and Employment Law Society.
From his faculty Bio:
“Ziaja joined the faculty after a career in civil litigation as a labor lawyer and public servant. While serving with the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C., he led efforts by the Agency in relation to litigation before the United States Supreme Court, which included engagement with the Office of the Solicitor General to prepare the government’s position for briefing and oral argument. He has also served as lead counsel in trial and appellate litigation on behalf of government and private litigants. Ziaja has delivered oral argument before the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third and Ninth Circuits, as well as the California Courts of Appeal. He has further appeared in many other federal and state matters before arbitrators, administrative tribunals, the California Supreme Court, the Oregon Supreme Court, and United States District Courts throughout the country.
In his former practice as a partner at a prominent 90-year old workers’ rights law firm, he represented labor unions and employee benefit plans serving tens of thousands of workers at public universities, National Laboratories, and major Pacific Coast ports, among many settings. In addition to litigating novel legal issues, his widely varied activities spanned negotiating collective bargaining agreements, drafting and administering ERISA plan terms, strategizing around employee discipline, and defending strikes and related free-speech activity against employer retaliation. He began his legal career in 2008 as an attorney-advisor with the United States Department of Labor, Office of Administrative Law Judges in San Francisco.
Ziaja’s legal scholarship centers on administrative law and governance, including as they influence labor and employment policy. His work incorporates historical methodology while examining contradictions in debates concerning the legitimacy of the modern administrative state. While immersed in jurisprudence, his research seeks to translate between seemingly abstract doctrinal trends and concrete implications for workers’ rights. He has also contributed to the study of administrative law at the global scale, where principles and mechanisms of administrative governance have sought to adapt to problem spaces beyond the reach of traditional state actors. Ziaja’s scholarship has appeared in law journals including the Pace Law Review and the University of California Law Constitutional Quarterly, and in monographs published by the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University and Cambridge University Press. He served as a co-author of Global Administrative Law: The Casebook (Sabino Cassese et al. ed., 3d ed., 2012).
Ziaja earned a law degree from the University of California College of Law, San Francisco, where he was Managing Editor of the University of California Law Constitutional Quarterly. He also holds an MPA magna cum laude from the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, and a BA with honors in history and class distinction from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He additionally attended the University of California, Berkeley on a graduate fellowship in history.”
