The Baldy Center Director

Matthew Dimick, Professor of Law and Director of The Baldy Center

Matthew Dimick.

Matthew Dimick

Matthew Dimick is Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo School of Law, and, director of The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. His scholarship can be broadly categorized under the heading of law and political economy. He is the author of the forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press, The Law and Economics of Income Inequality: A Critical Approach. Recent work has explored the epistemological status of “race” under capitalism, labor law and the republican theory of domination, a comparative evaluation of antitrust and labor law in correcting for firms’ market power, and the relationship between altruism, income inequality, and preferences for redistribution in the United States. He is currently undertaking a study on capitalism and antidiscrimination law and, along with John Abromeit and Paul Linden-Retek, is editing a volume on Jürgen Habermas’s legal and political theory.

Dimick’s research has appeared in both law reviews and economics, political science, and sociology journals, and has been featured in The Atlantic, Vox, Jacobin, and the On Labor blog. He has made regular contributions to Jacobin magazine and the Legal Form blog. He teaches regularly in contracts, law & society, labor law, employment law, and employment discrimination law and has also taught courses in federal income taxation, tax policy, and comparative and international labor and employment law.

Dimick holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a JD form Cornell Law School. Prior to coming to the University at Buffalo Law School, he was a Law Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. After law school and before graduate school, he worked for the Service Employees International Union in Washington, DC.

Conference Organizer

Blog Post Contributor

  • Matthew Dimick: Predistribution or Redistribution?
    1/19/24
    Although it’s been fifteen years since the Great Recession, the social, political, and economic problems it revealed are still very much with us. Historically astronomical levels of income inequality are fracturing the American polity. Matthew Dimick's forthcoming book, The Law and Economics of Income Inequality, enters into debates about how to address these problems.
  • Matthew Dimick: Using Legal Rules to Reduce Income Inequality
    7/5/24

    The United States has experienced a disturbing expansion of income and wealth inequality in the past three or four decades. We only fully recognized this yawning divide in the material fortunes of Americans after the 2008 financial crisis, which did little to change the direction of the trend. The Coronavirus pandemic has only added fuel to the inequality fire in a particularly grave way. Income inequality might be condemned on its own terms and for its political (erosion of democracy) and economic (financial instability) consequences. These worrisome trends in economic inequality have caused scholars to look for policy solutions. For legal scholars, in particular, the question arises: can legal rules do anything about income inequality? A long-standing position within law-and-economics scholarship gives a clear answer to this question: No. Read the blog.