Lauren Edelman

10 memorable leadership stories from 2017

Lauren Edelman quoted by The Washington Post, Dec. 18, 2017

“In most cases, employers are creating these policies more to protect themselves than to protect employees,” said Lauren Edelman. … “We don’t know when harassment training is effective, and we have reason to believe that maybe it’s counterproductive in some cases.”

Corporate harassment trainings don’t stop harassment

Lauren Edelman quoted by Vox, Oct. 24, 2017

“[Harassment training] is often a veneer, or what I call symbolic compliance,” said Lauren Edelman, a professor of law and sociology at Berkeley Law. The problem, she continued, is that courts don’t distinguish between legal procedures that are a veneer and those that are actually effective.

Sexual harassment at work

Lauren Edelman quoted by The Economist, Oct. 21, 2017

Young academics are at the mercy of star professors, whose goodwill and references they need when they start the hunt for a scarce permanent job. Universities may sack a junior staff member they find guilty of harassment, says Lauren Edelman. … But they often protect faculty members by paying off their accusers and insisting on non-disclosure agreements.

How human resources is failing women victims of workplace sexual harassment

Lauren Edelman quoted by Newsweek, Oct. 19, 2017

Anti-harassment policies and procedures are just “symbolic compliance,” … Lauren Edelman tells Newsweek. “They’re meant to protect the company,” says Edelman. “The reason they’re created is because they’ve become widely accepted as indicative that the company cares about stopping harassment even when they don’t.”

New law Ph.D. meets national scrutiny

Lauren Edelman and Robert Berring quoted in Yale Daily News, September 13, 2012

“The point that Robert Post makes about the possibility of there being a study of law that is independent of other disciplines, I think, is a hard point to make,” said Lauren Edelman…. “It’s somewhat unclear to me what it means to say that [the new Ph.D.] is wholly about law, given that law itself is a field very much populated by Ph.D.s in other disciplines, and much of the legal scholarship takes into account many of the fundamentals and methods represented.”

Bob Berring, a former interim dean of Berkeley Law, said the brand of legal education taught at Yale is already so academic that many in the profession consider it impractical. “I’ve been to five law schools in my time, and, of course, graduates of Yale dominate the legal academy,” Berring said. “But whenever someone from Yale comes up in conversation, someone always makes the joke, ‘But they didn’t go to law school, they went to Yale.'”