Laurie Edelman: Scholarship and mentorship in action

Abstract

My last email to Laurie Edelman, sent in September 2022, forwarded a Tenth Circuit Judicial Council Order discussing allegations against a District of New Mexico magistrate judge related to a special committee's finding that it “had reason to believe that she had engaged in sanctionable misconduct.” In letting Laurie know that this was “piece of evidence 1,000,001” that she had long “been so very correct” in her scholarship, I noted that the Order had found that many of the magistrate judge's employees chose not to report the conduct “because they feared retaliation” and still others “did not know if her behavior would constitute abusive conduct or a hostile work environment.” This was exactly what her scholarship has always described as two significant weak points in the enforcement of employment discrimination law and the realization of a fair and equitable workplace (Edelman 2016). In my mind, this September 2022 email epitomized what I had come to know—first as Laurie's former graduate student and research assistant, and now as a practicing lawyer—that Laurie was right. Her theories about endogeneity, symbolic structures, and the challenges of enforcing regulatory laws had broad applicability and this was just another instance of how, in practice, her theories and predictions proved to correctly identify real-world problems.