Seema’s research and scholarship is wide-ranging and covers many overlapping areas including technology and law, social movements, employment law, labor law, work law, state and local government law, and administrative law.  Combining legal analysis with qualitative research methodologies, her research captures the economic and socio-legal needs of low-wage workers, including the human dynamics of the state-worker relationship, the effect of workplace technological developments on economic policy and the workforce, and the role of institutional and individual actors in that project. Drawing on her years of litigation, policy advocacy, organizing, and teaching experience, including extensive collaboration with workers, labor unions, and worker centers, Seema’s research informs critical interventions that address the rapidly changing landscape of work law.

Before joining Stanford Law and the UC Berkeley Labor Center, Seema served as Clinical Director for the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), where she oversaw Berkeley Law’s eight community-based clinics, and taught Community Lawyering. Seema also taught courses at Berkeley Law on Movement Lawyering and Love, Lawyering & Liberation.

Prior to legal academia, Seema worked for a decade in the public sector. As the inaugural Deputy Director of San Francisco’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, she oversaw rulemaking and implementation for the country’s first municipal secure scheduling law and first local parental leave mandate. She served in the Obama Administration as Senior Advisor to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI); at the Office of the Solicitor, U.S. Department of Labor, as an Appellate Litigator in Washington, D.C.; and as a Trial Attorney in DOL’s Region IX office in San Francisco. After graduating from law school, Seema clerked for the Honorable Andre M. Davis, [then] U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland (later, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit) and the Honorable Harry Pregerson [dec.], U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Seema then moved to Gujarat, India, to organize slum-dwelling “ragpickers” (trash collectors) into a cooperative society, working alongside them to obtain state recognition as municipal workers. Prior to law school, Seema organized South Asian immigrant laundry workers on the east coast.

Seema recently completed a Practitioner in Residency with the UC Berkeley Labor Center. She was recently awarded the California Law Review Alumni of the Year Award (2023); the Dale Minami Berkeley Law Alumni Fellowship Award (2022); and the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Public Scholar Faculty Fellowship (2021-22).