Chicago-Kent College of Law Institute for Law and the Workplace Founder Martin H. Malin to Retire in 2021

CHICAGO, September 1, 2020 ̶̶ Martin H. Malin, founder and director of Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Institute for Law and the Workplace, has announced that he is retiring at the end of May 2021. Malin says that he plans to remain active in the legal community and to continue to arbitrate and mediate.

“It’s time to let the next generation of leadership take over ILW and develop the institute further,” he says.

Since joining the faculty in 1980, Malin has built ILW into a national center for research, training, dialogue, and reflection on the law that governs the workplace. ILW pools the resources of leading academic scholars and the practicing professional community to train students and professionals, monitor policies and trends, and reflect upon issues confronting the labor and employment law community in a neutral setting. When Chicago-Kent established ILW in 1996, it was among only a handful of law schools with a research center focused on this area of the law. In 2019 preLaw Magazine ranked ILW the number one employment law program in the country.

ILW publishes the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, which is the only faculty-edited, peer-reviewed employment law journal in the country focused on legal issues related to the workplace.  It also publishes the Illinois Public Employee Relations Report.

The institute has also built on what was an already strong Chicago-Kent program in labor and employment. In 1982 the law school launched the Federal Sector Labor Relations and Labor Law Conference, which is the largest annual conference on federal sector and postal labor relations and labor law held outside of Washington, D.C. Two years later it established the annual Illinois Public Sector Labor Relations Law Conference, which is the state’s largest conference on public sector labor law, drawing upwards of 600 lawyers and labor relations professionals to the law school each year.

Under Malin’s leadership, ILW has established four endowments and several scholarships for students. The institute is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and the law school is launching a fundraising campaign to rename it after Malin.

“Marty Malin is regarded highly by academics, policy makers, and practitioners throughout the labor and employment community,” says Chicago-Kent Dean Anita K. Krug. “His commitment to building an intellectual home for workplace law that brings everyone together to share varying perspectives is truly extraordinary.”

Malin is a former national chair of the Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law of the Association of American Law Schools, served as secretary of the American Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law Section, and is a former member of the board of governors and vice president of the National Academy of Arbitrators. During 1984 and 1985, Malin served as consultant to the Illinois state, local, and educational labor relations boards and drafted the boards’ regulations implementing the newly enacted Illinois Public Labor Relations Act and the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act. From 2003 to 2008, he served as reporter to the Association of Labor Relations Agencies’ Neutrality Project, which produced a restatement-like mini-treatise on labor board and mediation agency impartiality. In 2009 President Barack Obama appointed Malin as a member of the Federal Service Impasses Panel, which resolves impasses in collective bargaining between federal agencies and unions that represent the agencies’ employees. He served on the panel until 2017.

Malin has published more than 80 articles and seven books, including Public Sector Employment: Cases and Materials (West 2004, 3rd ed., 2016), which is the leading casebook on the law governing public employees, and Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace (West 2009, 3rd ed., 2019), a leading casebook on labor law. In 2016 the ABA presented Malin with the Arvid Anderson Public Sector Labor and Employment Attorney of the Year Award for lifetime contributions to public sector labor law.

The new ILW director will be announced this month.