Veena Dubal

Veena B. Dubal is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Her research considers labour laws in the lives of precarious workers and the role of public interest law in social change movements. She is an expert on the "gig economy."

Dubal studied international relations and feminist studies at Stanford University and graduated with honours in 2003. She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her Juris Doctor, which she completed in 2006. While in law school Dubal was a community activist focused on anti-war campaigns. She was as part of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action. Dubal was a Fulbright Program scholar in India from 2007 to 2008. After graduating, she was a Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow and public interest attorney at the Asian Law Caucus until December 2012. Dubal earned a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley in 2014. Her doctoral research used historical and ethnographic methodologies to study San Francisco taxi workers. After earning her PhD she joined the Clayman Institute for Gender Research as a postdoctoral fellow.

Dubal was appointed to the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 2015. Her research considers the impact of digital technologies on the lives of their workers, the relationship between law, precarious work and identity and the role of law in solidarity movements. Dubal is a critic of big tech and the rise of harmful artificial intelligence. She has described the transformation of service work following the great recession as Uberisation. She has investigated the taxi economy in San Francisco pre- and post-Uber, and how the everyday experiences of drivers changed with commodification of medallions, the leasing system, and the de-regulation following the legalisation of TNCs.

Dubal, who WIRED magazine called "an unlikely star in the tech world" has called for the regulation of tech companies that promote a gig economy by misclassifying their workers as independent contractors. She was one of 75 professors who wrote to the California Legislature to support a law that made employee status the default. In May 2018 California announced Assembly Bill 5, a law which requires organisations such as Lyft and Uber to treat their workers as employees and threw untold thousands of freelancers out of work on January 1, 2020.".

Dubal has also studied and written on the rise of the technology labour movement through organised protests and walk outs, such as the Google Walkout and Uber Strike.

Dubal has advocated for cities to restrict facial recognition technologies in an effort to minimise citizen surveillance and inappropriate data collection.

She has written for The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and Slate.