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Anne Marie Lofaso
Born	(1965-10-23) October 23, 1965
Nationality	United States Citizen
Alma mater	Oxford (D.Phil. 1997), Penn (J.D. 1991), Harvard (A.B. 1987)
Title	Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and Professor of Law
Spouse	Jim Heiko
Scientific career
Fields	Labor law, Employment Law
Institutions	West Virginia University

Anne Marie Lofaso (born October 23, 1965) is Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and Professor of Law at the West Virginia University College of Law, where she teaches courses in Employment Law, Labor Law, Comparative and International Work Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Socioeconomics, and related seminars. In 2010, the students of the graduating class named Lofaso WVU College of Law Professor of the Year. She is also a four-time recipient of the WVU College of Law faculty-scholarship award.

Biography

Early Life

Lofaso was born on October 23, 1965, at St. Luke's Women's Hospital in New York City, New York. She was baptized a Roman Catholic on November 7 at St. Bridget's Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn, NY. Lofaso’s family lived on Clyde Street, in Forest Hills, Queens, then on Putnam Avenue in Brooklyn, until finally moving in March 1966 to Austin Street, Forest Hills. On June 17, 1973 (Father’s Day), Lofaso’s family moved to Syosset, NY, a hamlet on Long Island, where Lofaso lived until she was 17 years old. Her family lives in the same house to this day.

Lofaso is the oldest daughter of Helen (Penny) Lofaso and the late Joseph (Joe) Lofaso. Penny Lofaso is the granddaughter of American entertainer, playwright, and composer, George M. Cohan. Joe was the son of Sicilian immigrants, Francesco (Frank) and Anna Lofaso. Frank Lofaso owned a grocery store and an apartment building in Brooklyn. Joe owned a small television repair and retail business located on the main strip of Syosset, known first as Syosset Radio and Music and later as Syosset Radio and TV. The business later branched into computer retail. Penny and Joe raised six children together: Penny’s daughter Caroline from a former marriage, and then the five children of their marriage—Anne, Mary, Frank, George, and Toni.

Education and Early Career

Lofaso began school in 1970 at P.S. 101, a New York City public school located in Forest Hills. She attended kindergarten through second grade there until her family moved to Syosset, Long Island, where she attended Alice P. Willits Elementary School; Harry B. Thompson Junior High School; and Syosset High School. Lofaso graduated from high school in 1983 as valedictorian. She won several graduation awards including the Long Island Newsday Scholar, Vinny Vigliotti Scholar-Athlete Award, Ademco Science Award, and the Linda Velsey Poetry and Prose Award.

In September 1983, Lofaso entered Harvard University where she was a Katelborn Scholar, a four-time Harvard College Scholar, and a four-time Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Scholar. Lofaso worked her way through college primarily as a librarian’s assistant at Lamont Library, Robbins Library of Philosophy, and Leverett House Library. She also worked for a brief time at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. In her freshman year, Lofaso lived in Harvard Yard’s Weld Hall with a dorm room overlooking the famous Widener Library. During her sophomore through senior years, she lived in Leverett House. Lofaso also spent two years as a springboard diver on the Harvard Women’s Swimming and Diving Team, but was forced to stop diving when she injured her neck during practice in her junior year. When she entered Harvard, Lofaso wanted to concentrate in Math and Philosophy, having been highly influenced by the work of John Rawls, a professor in Harvard’s philosophy department. In her junior year, Lofaso switched to History and Science, an honors-only major in Harvard’s History of Science Department. Lofaso focused her studies on the history of theories of evolution and wrote her honors thesis on America’s reception of Darwin’s theory of national selection, ultimately graduating magna cum laude in 1987.

After teaching middle and upper school history for one year at the Friend's Academy in Locust Valley, NY, and moonlighting as an LSAT preparation teacher for Stanley Kaplan, Inc., Lofaso entered the University of Pennsylvania Law School. To put herself through law school, Lofaso worked summers at two large law firms: the Wall Street firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and the Boston firm Hale and Dorr (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr). She also worked during the year as a research assistant to famed labor law professor Clyde W. Summers. Lofaso graduated from Penn Law in 1991 having earned two writing awards—the Herman Lazarus Prize and the Robert H. Jackson Award—for her student law review article, Pregnancy and Parental Care Policies in the European Community and the United States: What Do They Tell Us About Underlying Societal Values? 12 COMP. LAB. L.J. 458 (1991).

Between 1992 and 1997, Lofaso attended the University of Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar, where she studied labor law and jurisprudence under Sandra Fredman, Mark Freedland, and Paul Davies. During her studies at Oxford, Lofaso lived primarily at Somerville College, although she also lived for some time above the Catholic Chaplaincy at The Old Palace on Rose Place. Lofaso wrote her doctoral dissertation on the role of British and U.S. law regulating mass economic dismissals. Her dissertation readers were Mark Freedland and Cambridge Professor Simon Deakin. Lofaso graduated from Oxford with a doctor of philosophy in law in March 1997.

Legal Career

After graduating from law school, Lofaso became a member of the New York State Bar and spent one year as an attorney for the New York law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, where she practiced in the Bankruptcy and Business Reorganization Department. Lofaso took a one-year leave of absence from Oxford in 1993-94 to clerk for the Honorable James L. Oakes, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Although Lofaso began her career as a bankruptcy attorney, she soon learned that labor law was her true passion. After finishing her graduate studies at Oxford, Lofaso took a job as an attorney in the Appellate Court Branch and ultimately in the Supreme Court Branch of the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, DC. Lofaso spent ten years at the NLRB litigating cases before the United States courts of appeals and advising the Office of the Solicitor General on labor-related issues arising in cases before the United States Supreme Court. As an NLRB attorney, she briefed and argued dozens of cases before the federal courts of appeals.

Lofaso is a member of the New York State Bar; the United States Supreme Court Bar; the bars of the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and D.C. Circuits; and the United States District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.  

Academic Career

In 1996, Lofaso served as a lecturer for St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she gave tutorials to law students in British labor 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. In January 2007, she moved into full-time academia as an Associate Professor at West Virginia University College of Law. She received tenure and was promoted to full professor in 2011. Dean Joyce McConnell appointed Lofaso to the position of Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, effective July 1, 2011. In early 2011, Lofaso became a researcher for the Employment Policy Research Network.

The Influence of Professors

Lofaso’s high school social studies teacher introduced her to the study of philosophy. In her spare time, she began reading philosophy in particular, the works of Aristotle, Plato, and St. Thomas Aquinas. At Harvard, Lofaso initially declared a concentration in Philosophy and Mathematics, which introduced her to the field of analytic philosophy and philosophers such as John Rawls and W.V.O. Quine.

At Penn Law, Lofaso met two law professors who became important influences on her life: Clyde W. Summers and C. Edwin Baker. After taking Professor Summers’s labor law course, Lofaso decided to focus her studies on labor law and industrial relations. She subsequently earned a spot as an associate editor on the Comparative Labor Law Journal and after turning down a position as Articles Editor on that journal ultimately became Professor Summers’s research assistant. That same semester, Lofaso took Professor Baker’s constitutional law course and was quickly influenced by his ideas on liberty, equality, and democracy. They developed a friendship that lasted until his death in December 2009.

Both Summers and Baker encouraged Lofaso to continue her studies at Oxford, where she combined her love of philosophy and her passion for labor law. As a graduate student, Lofaso audited several seminars taught by Ronald Dworkin and Bernard Williams as well as by Joseph Raz. It was then that she became heavily influenced by Dworkin’s jurisprudence, in particular his critique of H.L.A. Hart’s legal positivism.

Lofaso’s Theory of Work Law: The Autonomous Dignified Worker

Lofaso has spent the past fifteen years developing a jurisprudential basis for workers’ rights. In Lofaso’s 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. The article is based on the second chapter of her doctoral dissertation. 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 Labor Law Journal. 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, and a recent article, The Persistence of Union Repression in an Era of Recognition, published in the Maine Law Review, 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.

Family

Lofaso is married to Jim Heiko, a statistician. They have one child, a daughter, Giorgianna.

Publications

Books

• Modern Labor Law in the Public and Private Sectors: Cases and Materials (Lexis Publishing, forthcoming 2012) (with S. Harris, J. Slater, and D. Gregory)
• Reversing Field: Examining Commercialization, Labor, Gender, and Race in 21st Century Sports Law (with andré douglas pond cummings) (West Virginia University Press 2010)
• A Practitioner’s Guide to Appellate Advocacy (ABA Publishing 2010)
• Religion in the Public Schools: A Road Map for Avoiding Lawsuits and Respecting Parents' Legal Rights (Americans United for Separation of Church and State 2009)

Selected Scholarly Articles

• In Defense of Public Sector Unions, 28 HOFSTRA LAB. L. J. 303 (2011)
• What We Owe Our Coal Miners, 5 HARV. L. & POL’Y REV. 87 (2011), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1792859
• Promises, Promises: Assessing the Obama Administration’s Record on Labor Reform, 20 NEW LABOR FORUM 65 (2011)
• The Vanishing Employee: Putting the Autonomous Dignified Union Worker Back To Work, 5 FIU L. REV. 497 (2010) (solicited article for law review symposium: Whither the Board? The National Labor Relations Act at 75), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1797984
• Talking Is Worthwhile: The Role of Employee Voice in Protecting, Enhancing and Encouraging Individual Rights to Job Security in a Collective System (A Tribute to Clyde Summers), 14 Employee Rights & Employment Pol’y J. 55 (2010), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1558563&download=yes
• Calling for Comparative and Interdisciplinary Study of Coal Mine Safety, Administrative & Regulatory Law News (ABA Publishing Fall 2010)
• Did Congress Authorize the NLRB To Decide Cases with only Two Sitting Board Members, Where the NLRA’s Statutory Language Provides for a Three-Member Board Quorum? 37 Supreme Court Preview 259 (ABA Publishing March 2010)
• The Relevance of the Wagner Act for Resolving Today’s Job-Security Crisis, Labor and Employment Relations Association Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting (2010)
• The Persistence of Union Repression in an Era of Recognition, 62 ME. L. REV. 199 (2010), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1449552
• Approaching Coal Mine Safety from a Comparative Law and Interdisciplinary Perspective, 111 W.V. L. REV. 1 (2008), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=993830
• September Massacre: The Latest Battle in the War on Workers’ Rights Under the National Labor Relations Act (2008), http://www.acslaw.org/files/ACS%20September%20Massacre.pdf, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1133607; reprinted in A Fresh Start for a New Administration: Reforming Law and Justice Policies (American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (American Constitution Society for Law and Policy 2008)
• Toward a Foundational Theory of Workers’ Rights: The Autonomous Dignified Worker, 76 U.M.K.C. L. REV. 1 (2007), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=975040
• Does Changing the Definition of Science Solve the Establishment Clause Problem of Teaching Intelligent Design as Science in Public Schools: Doing an End-run Around the Constitution, 4 PIERCE L. REV. 219 (2006), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=890083
• The Constitutional Debate over Teaching Intelligent Design as Science in Public Schools, December 2005, http://www.acslaw.org/pdf/Intelligent_Design_White_Paper.pdf
• Bush Appointee Strikes down Dover ID Policy as Unconstitutional, December 21, 2005, http://www.acsblog.org/cat-guest-bloggers.html
• Pre-termination Job Rights of British Workers Affected by Collective Redundancies, [1996] YEARBOOK OF EUROPEAN LAW 277 (Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1997)
• Pregnancy and Parental Care Policies in the European Community and the United States: What Do They Tell Us About Underlying Societal Values? 12 COMP. LAB. L.J. 458 (1991)
• America’s Reception to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, vol. 5 Synthesis, the undergraduate journal in the history and philosophy of science (1986) (journal ceased with vol. 6, no. 3 (summer 1987))

External Links

West Virginia University College of Law WVU College of Law, Lofaso Faculty Page Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy National Labor Relations Board Employment Policy Research Network EPRN, Lofaso Home Page American University Washington College of Law