Professional Affiliation

Professor, Georgetown University Law Center

Expert Bio

Cornelia “Nina” Pillard is a Professor at Georgetown University Law Center.  Her research addresses issues of equality and nondiscrimination, the law of work, and the processes and institutions by which law is effectuated.  She teaches civil procedure, constitutional Law, American and transnational legal theory, and various labor and employment courses.  Nina recently published Against the New Maternalism (with Naomi Mezey).  Her current research explores the bases for the legitimacy arbitration under pre-dispute agreements.

Professor Pillard joined the Georgetown Law faculty after a decade as an accomplished litigator.  A magna cum laude graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Pillard began her legal career in a federal clerkship with the Honorable Louis H. Pollak (1987-1988), held the Marvin M. Karpatkin fellowship at the ACLU (1988-89), and litigated individual and class-action racial discrimination cases and appeals at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc (1989-1994). Pillard’s Supreme Court work includes more than twenty-five cases that she has briefed and nine that she has argued before the Court.  Litigation highlights include United States v. Virginia (1996), which opened the Virginia Military Institute to women, and Nevada Dept. of Social Svcs. v. Hibbs (2003), which sustained Family and Medical Leave Act rights against constitutional challenge.  She is currently the faculty Co-Director of the Supreme Court Institute (SCI) at Georgetown Law. 

 

Wilson Center Project

“Reinventing Work Law: Codes of Corporate Conduct in the New Global Workplace”

Project Summary

 At the Wilson Center, Nina will be starting a major project on codes of conduct setting labor standards in transnational supply chains. Pillard's Wilson Center research is done in coordination with an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose project, Corporate Social Responsibility in the Electronics Manufacturing Industry:  The Implications of Soft Governance for Labor Standards, is funded by the Swiss Network for International Scholars.