Sachs is currently the Joseph Goldstein Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches labor law. He says that the Yale Village, which embraced him when he arrived as a student in 1995, has been integral to his law career every step of the way.
It afforded him the opportunity of clerking after graduation with Judge Stephen Reinhardt ’54 on the 9th Circuit. There he grappled with such questions as the rights of capital defendants, the constitutionality of campaign finance restrictions, and the scope of the Fair Labor Standards Act. On these and other critically important issues, Sachs was able to bring to bear the knowledge and skills he had learned in New Haven.
Next he joined the Workplace Justice Project in Brooklyn, where his aim was to provide legal support to the organizing efforts of low-wage immigrant workers. But first, he says, he had to figure out how to develop a new approach to labor law, something he would not have been able to do without the support of the Yale Village.
“Neither traditional employment law nor traditional labor law adequately addressed the issues faced by the immigrant workers I represented,” says Sachs. “What was most needed was not a knowledge of the cases and rules as they’d been applied, but new theories about how law could be understood in a different way and reconstructed to meet people’s needs. The approach to law I’d learned at Yale was exactly what my clients needed.”
From Brooklyn, Sachs went to Washington D.C. where he continued his work in the labor movement as Assistant General Counsel to the Service Employees International Union. Again, his task was to confront a deeply dysfunctional legal regime and come up with ways to make law serve the people it was designed to serve.
Today, Sachs says, he has the best public interest job of all—teaching at Yale Law School. Recently, he received the 2007 Yale Law School Teaching Award.
“My path has wound its way through the field of labor law,” Sachs commented at the annual Yale Public Interest reception. “But reflecting on the state of affairs more broadly, the challenges I faced are likely to be challenges for us all.
“We do not live in a moment that calls for small thinking, or small changes, or simple application of rules already written,” he said. “For better or worse, this is a time that calls for broad rethinkings and new theories, and lawyers who can bring them into practice. As I see it, we live at a time that calls loudly and clearly for Yale public interest lawyers.”