Leticia Saucedo
· Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law and Co-Director of the UC Davis Labor and Community Center of the Greater Capital RegionUniversity of California, Davis · Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Active 2000–2023
About
Leticia Saucedo is a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law. She is an expert in employment, labor, and immigration law, and she teaches courses in immigration law, employment law, labor law, and torts. Her research interests focus on the intersections of employment, labor, and immigration law, particularly examining the impact of employment and labor laws on conditions in low-wage workplaces and how immigrant workers respond to these conditions. Her scholarly work has been published in several law reviews, including Washington University Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, UC Davis Law Review, and Ohio State Law Journal. Saucedo has also served as a visiting professor at Duke Law School and as a research scholar with the Chief Justice Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity at UC Berkeley. Her background includes a cum laude A.B. in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College and a cum laude J.D. from Harvard Law School. She has held positions such as Staff Attorney at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, & Jacobson, and law clerk for the Texas Supreme Court. Her work emphasizes critical race theory, employment discrimination, and immigration policy, contributing significantly to understanding the legal and social dynamics affecting immigrant and low-wage workers.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Law
- Computer Science
- Physics
- Law and economics
- Engineering
Selected publications
Penn State University Press eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Political Science
- Sociology
Penn State University Press eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
The narrative of ethno-racial labor competition and employee choice
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2022-12-13
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCapitalism operates by intensifying and enlarging racial divisions, and it self-perpetuates by making its racialized processes seem natural. This chapter illustrates how depictions of workers freely choosing their worksites is propagated through prominent news media accounts with a specific focus on three stories from the New York Times. These stories perpetuate the idea that workers compete with each other to keep wages low, and that employees choose to work through a deadly pandemic to keep their low-wage jobs. The narrative of employee choice is the vehicle for naturalizing the processes by which employers maintain low-wage, racialized and segregated workplaces. To maintain the illusion of worker choice, these stories must ignore the employer's active participation in the entry and exit of groups of workers. The media stories have real implications for the enforcement of U.S. employment discrimination laws.
A New Paradigm: Rideshare Drivers, Collective Labor Action, andAntitrust
Buffalo law review · 2021
Senior authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Engineering
Illegitimate Citizenship Rules
Washington University law review · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Law
- Sociology
In 2017, the Supreme Court decided Sessions v. Morales-Santana, a challenge to 8 U.S.C. § 1409, the law governing the conferral of U.S. citizenship to children born abroad to parents who are U.S. citizens. As the Court noted in a forceful opinion, § 1409 imposed different and more onerous physical presence requirements on unwed fathers than unwed mothers, making it difficult for nonmarital fathers to transmit their U.S. citizenship to their foreign-born children. Such distinctions, the Court concluded, were rooted in archaic gender stereotypes and thus incompatible with equal protection principles. Although Morales-Santana corrected the gender discrimination inherent in § 1409, it said nothing of the statute’s other constitutionally infirm provisions. Although it has drawn little attention, § 1409 also discriminates on the basis of illegitimacy, which like gender, is a quasi-suspect classification for purposes of equal protection law. Specifically, § 1409 requires nonmarital children to prove that they have been legitimated by their unwed U.S. citizen fathers to establish their derivative citizenship claim. By contrast, foreign-born children in wedlock need not show that they have been legitimated; by virtue of their parents’ marriage, they are legally recognized as “legitimate” children. These legitimation requirements have made it more difficult for foreign-born nonmarital children of U.S. citizen parents to prove what should be regarded as their pre-existing citizenship. Crucially, in general, laws such as these that distinguish on the basis of a parents’ marital status constitute illegitimacy discrimination. Yet, the Court in Morales-Santana neglected to acknowledge this unequal treatment of nonmarital children, focusing instead on how § 1409 discriminated on the basis of gender and effectively allowing this unconstitutional practice to continue. This Article calls attention to the prevalence of illegitimacy classifications in immigration law by identifying what we term “illegitimate citizenship rules.” In highlighting the pervasiveness of this form of discrimination, this Article makes three contributions. As a descriptive matter, these rules demonstrate the unfinished project within equal protection law of eviscerating discrimination against nonmarital children, which includes the treatment of such children in immigration law. As a doctrinal matter, the Article argues that the Supreme Court’s narrow focus on the sex equality dimension of § 1409 rendered invisible the discrimination against nonmarital children. Finally, as the Article makes clear, by discriminating against nonmarital children, illegitimate citizenship rules promote and perpetuate the “traditional” family and thus discriminate against those families that do not comport with the heterosexual marital family model. The Article concludes by recommending that Congress seize the opportunity created by Morales-Santana to address and eventually eradicate the ongoing discrimination against nonmarital children who are born abroad.
2019-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingIllegitimate Citizenship Rules
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingOrganizing for Workplace Rights When Immigration Law Discourages It
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-11-01 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingA premise of this book is that labor union organizing must be revived, especially in industries where unions have little or no traction. In this chapter I step back and consider how immigration law makes organizing particularly difficult in some fields. I do not simply describe the structural problems. My thesis is that the problems of organizing in the immigrant workplace provide direction for the corresponding solutions. Innovative collective activity can occur in the immigrant workplace despite the failings of federal labor and employment laws, but workers must broaden their collective action to challenge immigration laws that effectively restrict concerted activity. This effort will succeed only by enlisting state and local governments to exercise their authority to ensure the well-being of all workers within their jurisdictions.
The Parallel Worlds of Guest Work and Gig Work
eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe Legacy of the Immigrant Workplace: Lessons for the 21st Century Economy
Scholarly Commons (University of the Pacific) · 2017-01-01 · 2 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLeticia Saucedo is a Professor of Law at U.C. Davis School of Law. She is an expert in employment, labor, and immigration law and she teaches immigration law and employment law at U.C. Davis. She has developed experiential courses in international and domestic service learning that explore the immigration consequences of crime and domestic violence in a post-conflict society. She has been a visiting professor at Duke Law School and a research scholar with the Chief Justice Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at U.C. Berkeley. Professor Saucedo’s research interests lie at the intersections of employment, labor, and immigration law. She has focused her research on the impact of employment and labor laws on conditions in low-wage workplaces, and on the responses of immigrant workers to their conditions. Her law review articles have appeared in Notre Dame Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review the Ohio State Law Journal, the Buffalo Law Review, and the Richmond Law Review, among others. Professor Saucedo earned her AB, cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1984 and her JD, cum laude, in 1996 from Harvard Law School.
Frequent coauthors
- 28 shared
Raquel Aldana
University of California, Davis
- 25 shared
Diana Pardo
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte
- 25 shared
Ernesto Zarco Ortiz
Universidad de Guadalajara
- 25 shared
Esther Morales
California State University, Fullerton
- 25 shared
La Cruz
International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation
- 25 shared
Kevin B. Johnson
University of Pennsylvania
- 25 shared
Héctor López
Tecnológico de Monterrey
- 25 shared
Ana Peluffo
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte
Awards & honors
- Member, American Law Institute (2010-present)
- Research Scholar, The Chief Justice Warren Institute on Race…
- Professor, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Neva…
- Visiting Professor, Duke University School of Law (2009)
- Staff Attorney, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education…
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