Charlotte Garden

Charlotte Garden joined the Law School faculty in Fall 2022. She specializes in labor law, employment law, and constitutional law. Her interests include the intersection of workers' rights and the Constitution, and how law supports (or undermines) worker voice and power. 

Professor Garden's scholarship has appeared in several leading law reviews, including the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Fordham Law Review, and the William & Mary Law Review. Her work for generalist audiences appears in outlets such as SCOTUSBlog and OnLabor. In 2019, Cambridge University Press published her edited volume, The Cambridge Handbook of U.S. Labor Law For the Twenty-First Century (co-edited with Rick Bales). She is a co-author of two leading work law casebooks: Modern Labor Law in the Private and Public Sectors, with Joe Slater, Anne Marie Lofaso, Richard F. Griffin, Jr., and Seth Harris; and Employment Law Cases and Materials, with Mark Rothstein, Lance Liebman, Kimberly Yuracko, and Susan Cancelosi.

Professor Garden is active in national policy efforts to strengthen workers' rights, including the Economic Policy Institute's Unequal Power Project, a multiyear interdisciplinary initiative to reexamine the foundational assumptions about the balance of power in labor market relationships, and the Clean Slate for Worker Power, a project of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. In 2019, she testified before Congress (House Committee on Education and Labor) as they considered the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), the most ambitious effort to reform American labor law since the New Deal. 

Prior to coming to the University of Minnesota, Professor Garden was a professor at Seattle University School of Law where she served as Co-Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Development. In 2016 she was a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law. Professor Garden clerked for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She received her J.D. from NYU School of Law (2003) and her B.A. from McGill University (2000).