Faculty/Staff ProfileTitle

Areas of Expertise
Administrative Law
Labor Law
Employment Law
Contracts
International and Comparative Law

Biography
Andrew J. Ziaja is currently an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He has also visited at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was Interim Director of the Martin H. Malin Institute for Law and the Workplace from 2024-2025. He has, in addition, taught political science at the University of Arizona, School of Government and Public Policy. His teaching and research centers on workplace law and administrative law, drawing on methodologies from history and policy analysis, as well as from his extensive background in practice. Ziaja’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming, for example, in the Utah Law Review, Seattle University Law Review, Pace Law Review, and monographs published by the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University and Cambridge University Press. His work also has been recommended on the Legal Theory Blog (twice). He is a co-author of teaching and reference texts including Understanding Labor Law (7th ed., forthcoming), Labor Management Relations: Strikes, Lockouts and Boycotts (2026-2027 ed., forthcoming), and Global Administrative Law: The Casebook (Sabino Cassese et al. ed., 3d ed., 2012).

Ziaja joined the legal academy after a nearly fifteen-year career in civil litigation as a labor lawyer, law partner, and public servant. While serving most recently with the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C., he led efforts by the Agency in litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court, working with the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Solicitor General to develop the government’s briefing and oral argument strategy. He has also been lead counsel in trial and appellate litigation on behalf of government and private litigants. Ziaja has argued as lead counsel before the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Third and Ninth Circuits, as well as the California Courts of Appeal. He has further appeared in numerous federal and state matters before arbitrators, administrative tribunals, the California Supreme Court, the Oregon Supreme Court, and U.S. District Courts throughout the country. He began his legal career in 2008 as an attorney-advisor with the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Administrative Law Judges in San Francisco, before joining a 90-year-old California law firm representing labor unions, employee plaintiffs, and employee-benefit plans. He serves as an arbitrator and mediator in labor, employment, and ERISA disputes.

Ziaja earned a law degree from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, where he was Managing Editor of the University of California Law Constitutional Quarterly. He holds an MPA magna cum laude from the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, and a BA with honors in history and class distinction from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He attended the University of California, Berkeley on a graduate fellowship in history.