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Professor Laris Cohen’s scholarship concentrates on employment and labor law, with a particular focus on its intersections with civil rights law and the law of remedies. His working paper, A Reemployment Right for People in Pretrial Detention, proposes a statutory reemployment right for people in pretrial detention modeled on the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA). His law student note, Democratizing the FLSA Injunction: Toward a Systemic Remedy for Wage Theft, 127 Yale L.J. 706 (2018), argues that the widespread failure to enforce minimum wage and overtime law is due in part to the fact that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) and most of its state equivalents reserve injunctive relief for agency actions and preclude it in private actions.
Prior to coming to Hofstra, Professor Laris Cohen served as a trial attorney with the New York Regional Solicitor’s Office of the U.S. Department of Labor, where he litigated cases in federal district court and administrative courts involving wage and hour law, workplace safety, employment discrimination, pension protection, and protections for immigrant workers. Before that he served as a staff attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, where he litigated civil rights impact cases involving immigration detention, freedom of speech, and access to medical care for people in New York jails.
Professor Laris Cohen clerked for the Honorable Myron H. Thompson, U.S. district judge for the Middle District of Alabama, and the Honorable Pierre N. Leval, U.S. appellate judge for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.Phil. in Politics with first-class honors from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in History and Political Science summa cum laude from Yale University.
Professor Laris Cohen teaches employment law, labor law, and torts.