10/20/2026
Look for our latest issue of UC Irvine Law Monthly newsletter today! It features stories about faculty excellence, law clinics impact, alumni spotlights, student success, and more!
In the newsletter, you’ll read about Professor Veena Dubal, a leading scholar of law, technology, and work, who was named a 2026 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation!
The Freedom Scholar Award recognizes scholars whose research advances movements for justice and freedom and whose work challenges entrenched structures of economic and political power. The invite-only award provides each scholar with an unrestricted $250,000 prize, giving recipients unusual freedom to pursue ambitious research on their own terms.
Professor Dubal’s pathbreaking scholarship examines how law and emerging technologies transform the conditions of work, with particular attention to low-wage and immigrant workers. Her research on gig work, algorithmic control, and what she has termed “algorithmic wage discrimination” has established influential frameworks for understanding how data, surveillance, and machine-learning systems are altering wages, worker power, and economic mobility.
Dubal plans to use the award to advance a new phase of interdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence, expertise, and inequality, while continuing long-term scholarship on how workers experience and contest technological and legal change.
Dubal is one of only three scholars selected for the honor this year, alongside author and University of British Columbia Professor Naomi Klein and Princeton University Professor Durba Mitra.
