David L. Gregory is the Dorothy Day Professor of Law and the Executive Director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law. He has taught at the St. John’s University School of Law since August 1982. He was tenured in 1985, and promoted to full professor in 1986. He was appointed the Kenneth Wang Research Professor of Law for the 1987-88 academic year. In August 2006, he was appointed the inaugural chairholder of the Dorothy Day Professorship. In August 2009, he was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law. Prior to joining the St. John’s Law faculty in 1982, Professor Gregory was an equal employment opportunity counselor with the Postal Service, a labor relations representative with Ford Motor Company, and an attorney with a prominent management labor and employment law firm in Detroit.
He hosts the annual management lawyers’ colloquium at the School of Law, now in its 14th year. He brings major speakers to the School of Law every year, ranging from Cesar Chavez in 1987 to AFL-CIO General Counsel John Hiatt in 2009, and including three Chairmen of the National Labor Relations Board (Bill Gould in 1996, Peter Hurtgen in 2001, and Wilma Liebman in 2010) and Solicitor General of the United States Drew Days III in 1996.
Professor Gregory often serves as a media commentator on labor, employment, and constitutional law issues; he regularly appears on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, FOX and CSPAN television programs and is frequently quoted in the New York Times and other major newspapers. He is the co-author of Modern Labor Law in the Public and Private Sectors (Lexis, Forthcoming, 2011) (with S. Harris, J. Slater, and A. Lofaso). He is also co-author of Labor-Management Relations and the Law (Foundation Press, 1999), and the editor of Labor and the Constitution (Garland Press, 1999) and of Labor Law (N.Y.U. and Dartmouth Presses, 1993), a contributing author for the treatise How Arbitration Works (American Bar Association and BNA Press, 5th and 6th Edition and supplements) and a chapter editor and author for the treatise, Discipline and Discharge in Arbitration (American Bar Association and BNA Press, 2nd Edition, 2009). He has over two hundred academic and professional publications, including more than one hundred articles and book reviews in leading law journals, including those of Duke, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Texas, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Boston College, Boston University, Tulane, George Washington, Georgia, William and Mary, Washington and Lee, Fordham, Villanova, Loyola, and St. John’s. His research has been supported twice by the AFL-CIO Fund for Labor Studies at the University of Michigan Law School.
He teaches a dozen different labor, employment, and constitutional law courses, concentrating especially on Labor Law, Advanced Labor Law, Employment Law, and Employment Discrimination. He has also taught Public Sector Labor and Employment Law, Labor and Employment Arbitration, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Negotiations, and Jurisprudence.
In 1998, his was a prize-winning paper for the St. John’s Vincentian Center for Church and Society. In 1999, he received the St. John’s University Founder’s Day Award. In 2004 (Inaugural Award) and 2006, he received the Student Bar Association’s Faculty Advisor and Mentor of the Year Award. In 2008, he received the Faculty Outstanding Achievement Award, conferred by the President of St. John’s University. Professor Gregory is faculty advisor to the St. John’s Labor Relations and Employment Law Society, 1982-Present; the Federalist Society, 1992 founding of the Chapter at St. John’s—Present; and, the Irish Law Students, 2000-Present.
He has lectured at the law schools of Yale, Harvard, Notre Dame, Illinois, Villanova, Montana, Baylor, Santa Clara, Stetson, Brigham Young, St. Thomas, Florida International, and Capital Universities, and at University College, Dublin, Ireland, the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, the Jesuit Curia, Rome, Queen Mary University of London, New York University, Fordham University, Marquette University, College of the Holy Cross, De Paul University, the University of Dayton, Mount Sinai Medical School, Molloy College, City University of New York, State University of New York, the New York City Police Academy, and the Catholic Worker. He has been a visiting adjunct professor at the University of Colorado, Brooklyn, Hofstra, and New York Law Schools, 1992-1998. In 1997, he was a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute Department of Law in Florence, Italy.
Professor Gregory is a member of the American Bar Foundation (limited to one-third of one percent of the lawyers in the United States), American Law Institute, Who’s Who in American Law, the Society of Policy Scientists, the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice, the Michigan, New York, and American Bar Associations, and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (Labor and Employment Law, Arbitration, Civil Rights, and Employee Benefits Committees). He has been the Chairperson of the Labor and Employment Law (1996) and Employment Discrimination Sections (2000) of the Association of American Law Schools, and Chair of the Law School Liaisons Committee of the Executive Committee of the Labor Law Section of the New York State Bar Association (1994-2001).
He has authored the first comprehensive law review articles ever published on Catholic social teaching on labor, on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, and on Blessed Frederic Ozanam, the founder of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. See, e.g.: Catholic Labor Theory and the Transformation of Work, 45 Washington and Lee Law Review 119-157 (1988); Catholic Social Teaching on Work, 49 Labor Law Journal 912 (1998); Dorothy Day’s Lessons for the Transformation of Work, 14 Hofstra Labor Law Journal 57 (1996); Dorothy Day, Workers’ Rights and Catholic Authenticity, 26 Fordham Urban Law Journal 1371 (1999); Blessed Frederic Ozanam: Building the Good Society, 3 St. Thomas Law Journal 21 (2005). Since 2001, he has served as General Counsel pro bono to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
Professor Gregory has co-chaired many major international conferences, including: the “Transatlantic Perspectives on Labor” Conference at the University College Dublin Law School in July 2000, attended by more than two hundred persons, with more than 90 speakers on more than 20 panels, and with keynote remarks by former Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board William B. Gould IV (with selected papers published in 14 New York International Law Review 1 (2001); and, the national conference of the Religiously-Affiliated Law Schools at St. John’s in July 2000 (published in 74 St. John’s Law Review 565 (2000). He co-chaired, and St. John’s co-sponsored, the “Transatlantic Perspectives on Alternative Dispute Resolution” Conference, July 26-28, 2006 at the Queen Mary University of London campus, in London’s Charterhouse Square. The opening reception was at Lincoln’s Inn, and the conference banquet was at the Armourers’ Guild Hall. The Right Honorable Lord Harry Woolf, immediate past Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, was the keynote speaker. There were more than fifty panelists on a dozen different panels, with more than 120 general attendees, including Supreme Court members from several nations, law professors, arbitrators and mediators, and advocates from around the world. The conference papers were published in 81 St. John’s Law Review 1 (2007). On October 26-27, 2007, Professor Gregory co-chaired and hosted the fifteenth annual conference of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists at St. John’s (with more than 400 attendees, the single largest academic conference in the history of the School of Law), with selected papers published in 47 Journal of Catholic Legal Studies 1 (2008).
Forthcoming conferences include:
“The Theology of Work and the Dignity of Workers, “co-sponsored by the St. John’s Center for Labor and Employment Law and the Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice, March 18-19, 2011 (Keynote Speaker-AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka (invited); and, “Labor and Employment Dispute Resolution: International and Comparative Perspectives,” Cambridge University, Fitz William College, July 20-23, 2011.
He is a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators, and he is on the Labor and Employment Arbitrator Panels of the American Arbitration Association, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the New York State Public Employment Relations Board, the New York City Office of Collective Bargaining, and Nassau County, New York and the Civil Service Employees Association. He is also a designated arbitrator on many private and public sector labor contracts.
Professor Gregory received his B.A. cum laude from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in 1973, where he was a Basselin Scholar (academic merit full tuition, room, and board scholarship) in the Honors Program of the School of Philosophy. His M.B.A. in labor relations is from the Wayne State University Graduate School of Business, 1977, and his J.D. magna cum laude is from the University of Detroit School of Law, 1980. He did his graduate work in law at the Yale University Law School, where he earned his LL.M. in 1982 and the Doctorate in the Science of Jurisprudence, the highest degree in law, J.S.D., in 1987.