Speaker: Jennifer Gordon
Professor Jennifer Gordon is beginning a project on new UNHCR and World Bank initiatives in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, seeking to employ refugees in the lowest-wage jobs in countries of first asylum. For example, the Jordanian government has recently received over a billion dollars in grants and loans from the US and EU in exchange for promising to employ 150,000 Syrians in garment factories for export, and to grant 50,000 others work permits for agriculture and construction. Professor Gordon will discuss the implementation of this program to date, with a focus on its impact on workers’ rights for Syrians, other migrants, and Jordanians. Her goal is to generate recommendations to ensure that refugees—as well as thos
Jennifer Gordon is Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2003. She teaches courses in the fields of immigration law, labor law, and legislation/regulation, and writes about the regulation of the low-wage workplace, workers’ rights in the context of global labor migration, and the relationship between law and social change. Her book, Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, was published in 2005 by Harvard University Press, and her articles have appeared in the UCLA, Northwestern, California, and Iowa Law Reviews, among others. Prior to joining the Fordham faculty, in 1992 she founded the Workplace Project, a nationally recognized non-profit immigrant worker center, and served as its director until 1998. Gordon was given the “Outstanding Public Interest Lawyer of the Year” award by Equal Justice Works, and received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. In 2015, the National Law Journal named Gordon an “Outstanding Woman Lawyer.”
Pizza will be served.
Leitner International Law Lecture Series