White-collar sweatshops

Dylan gottlieb

Aeon

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thursday

White-collar sweatshops

How did law firms and other professional workplaces become places of such crushing and soulless work?

by Dylan Gottlieb + BIO

Photo by Allen Enriquez/Getty Images

writes and teaches about the history of American cities and capitalism as assistant professor in history at Bentley University in Massachusetts, US. He is the author of Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (forthcoming, May 2026). He is also the co-host of Who Makes Cents? A History of Capitalism Podcast.

The judge could scarcely believe the figures. Reviewing the request for legal fees by Skadden, the New York-based law firm, the US District Court Judge Leonard Sand ‘shuddered to think’ that any one lawyer could work so relentlessly. Margaret Enloe, a second-year associate, had logged 78.5 billable hours working for a client over a five-day stretch. After a 17-hour day, she had trudged back to the office the next morning – and gone on to bill 24 hours straight. Enloe shrugged off the judge’s disbelief. ‘I’m a fairly high-energy-level person,’ she said. ‘I worked more than one 24-hour day when I was at Skadden.’

That stamina, however, did not make for a long career at the firm. Enloe would not go on to earn a coveted election to partnership. After two and a half years, she left to become an in-house attorney at an accounting firm. ‘I needed to change something. I could not keep going at that pace,’ she told me later. ‘It felt unsustainable.’

Extreme as her work conditions sounded to the judge, Enloe’s experience was becoming the norm at the United States’ largest law firms in the 1980s. Many began to ask associates to bill more hours: 2,500 or even 3,000 per year. Even as young lawyers worked longer – spending 11 or 12 hours every day, including weekends, at the office – they rarely, if ever, enjoyed training by senior attorneys. Instead, they were given menial tasks, like proofreading or document review, with no idea of how it fit into the big picture. Meanwhile, the chances of making partner grew narrower year after year. By the early 2000s, the five-year attrition rate at large firms would rise above 80 per cent.

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Year by year, conditions deteriorated. White-collar workers became more like cogs in a machine than self-directed professionals, more like machinists labouring under a shop steward than valued apprentices ascending a path to partnership. Yes, it took place inside wood-panelled offices, but the dynamic resembled conditions that industrial workers had long faced on factory floors. And, just like in a factory, the system was fantastically profitable. Firms billed clients five times more than they paid out in salary to their relatively unskilled junior associates. ‘The workers not only don’t own the means of production,’ one big-law associate told a reporter. ‘They are the means of production.’

By the end of the 1980s, it was impossible to ignore just how much young lawyers like Margaret Enloe were suffering. They experienced depression at five to six times the rate of the general population. One in five abused alcohol. Attorneys had the highest rate of suicide of any profession. A majority, particularly at large firms, questioned the ethics of their work. One American Bar Association (ABA) report concluded that associates were ‘at the breaking point’.

In truth, a wider shift was afoot. It wasn’t just lawyers: many of the highest-achieving professionals in the US – doctors, bankers and management consultants – were growing unhappier, even as their employers enjoyed record profits. But why did people like Enloe put up with life inside a white-collar ‘sweatshop’ – and why do many continue to do so today?

This was no accident. Young professionals from nontraditional backgrounds were more vulnerable

The answer lies in the collision of three forces that would remake nearly every profession starting in the 1980s: the rise of finance; ruthless new management techniques; and a more diverse generation of young people streaming from the top US colleges into the workforce.

As the venerable partnerships hired rapidly to accommodate the transactional demands of Wall Street, they grew much more diverse in terms of race and gender. Yet they also became terrible places to work. This was no accident. Young professionals from nontraditional backgrounds were more vulnerable – more prone to carry large educational debts, less likely to enjoy reserves of family wealth, less able to access alternative career paths – and thus faced the deepest exploitation.

Taken together, those changes made for a professional world that is, on its face, less racist, less patriarchal and more meritocratic than the one it supplanted, dominated as it was by upper-class white Protestant men from a small corner of the northeastern US. But elite diversification was not the result of altruism. It was also fantastically profitable for the firms that pursued it.

Today, the members of the newly diverse professional class work much harder, in far more competitive environments, with slimmer chances for advancement. From Seattle to New York, young professionals whisper that their firms have become ‘sweatshops’: factories where profits are squeezed out of their white-collar labour force. The exclusionary status quo of the previous mid-century has given way to something more diverse – yet much more exploitative.

As recently as the 1960s, things had been different. The largest law firms, which held a near-monopoly on corporate and Wall Street clients, were ruled by a gentlemanly code of WASP professionalism. And it was no wonder: lawyers at the most old-line and prestigious – so-called ‘white-shoe’ – firms were almost all white Protestant men from elite universities. In the late 1950s, more than seven in 10 of the partners across the 20 largest Wall Street firms had earned their JD (law doctorate) from Harvard University in Massachusetts, Yale University in Connecticut or Columbia University in New York. Firms had cosy relationships with the banks and corporations they advised, strengthened by their shared class and religious backgrounds. The Milbank law firm was known for representing the Rockefeller dynasty. Another firm, Davis Polk, oversaw debt issues for the investment bank Morgan Stanley. An unspoken rule mandated that the firms refrain from outright competition. White-shoe firms refused to handle ‘dishonourable’ deals like hostile corporate takeovers, lest they disrupt their close ties to corporate managers.

But it wasn’t all peachy. In 1970, there were only three female partners and 40 female associates across New York’s top firms. Even white-ethnic men were suspect. In his study The Wall Street Lawyer (1964), Erwin O Smigel noted that WASP firms ‘want lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasing personalities, and “clean-cut” appearances.’

Lower down the hierarchy sat Jewish and mixed-ethnicity firms like Skadden, Enloe’s employer. Shut out of the competition for the largest Wall Street clients, they dominated the derogated fields of litigation, real estate, bankruptcy, and mergers. In New York, many of their partners had roots in the working-class immigrant neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Joseph Flom, the driving force behind Skadden’s ascendance, grew up as the son of a Jewish garment worker in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He attended Harvard Law School on a GI Bill scholarship. But after graduation, Flom was repeatedly rejected by New York’s WASP firms. So, he went to work at Skadden, which, like almost all Jewish and mixed firms, was tiny. Founded in 1948, by the early 1960s, it had only 10 lawyers.

In 1958, lawyers at large firms could not ‘reasonably’ bill more than 1,300 hours a year without feeling overworked

Whatever their differences, both WASP and Jewish firms with elite aspirations imitated the management structure pioneered by Cravath, the ultimate white-shoe institution. In that system, firms were structured as professional partnerships, with equity and profits split between all partners. A commitment to a code of professional ethics kept firms from adopting the managerial structures we all know today. There were no HR or PR departments, few accountants, no rigid timekeeping system, no layer of mid-level bureaucrats, no separation between owners and management. Since law firms were privately held, their business decisions were also highly secretive. Firms didn’t disclose their earnings or partners’ salaries. Hiring and partnership decisions were shrouded in mystery. Client rosters were closely guarded, too. As the legal journalist Kim Isaac Eisler wrote in Shark Tank (1990), his exposé of this era, ‘a lawyer asked whom he represented’ would ‘respond with indignation’. One ‘might as well ask for the names of the women with whom he had slept.’

Across New York firms, young lawyers experienced relatively humane working conditions. In 1958, one pamphlet found that lawyers at large firms could not ‘reasonably’ bill more than 1,300 hours a year without feeling overworked. Relatively unconcerned with maximising profits and committed to a system of apprenticeship, firms kept the number of partners and associates (called ‘leverage’) roughly even. Hiring was slow. Even if many associates still wouldn’t make partner, lower leverage meant that partners were able to mentor new hires, with a reasonable expectation that they were training colleagues and co-owners for a long tenure in the firm.

This arrangement – with its clear ethnic and gender exclusions but tolerable working conditions – would not survive the economic revolution of the 1980s. As finance moved to the centre of US life, it wouldn’t just transform Wall Street: it would take an immense toll on the lawyers who served as bankers’ colleagues on every deal.

In the 1980s, Wall Street – newly deregulated and gorging on global capital flows – initiated a tsunami of mergers and acquisitions, buyouts and hostile takeovers of US companies. From 1975 to 1988, the annual value of mergers multiplied more than 20 times. To handle those transactions, which had high stakes and happened fast, law firms needed to remake themselves. They had to get larger, better managed, and more hierarchical. As the transactional short-termism of Wall Street spread to New York’s legal world, firms had to become more like the banks and corporations they advised.

Above all else, law firms had to grow – and fast. Takeovers required more than just a few extra lawyers: they needed an army of associates ready to go ‘over the top’ on high-stakes deals. During the 1980s, New York saw its largest law firms fully double in size. Skadden, the first firm to fully remake itself for merger work, grew even faster. In 1970, its 28 lawyers had worked in an office perched above a haberdashery shop on Fifth Avenue. By 1978, the firm had grown to 150 lawyers. But as takeovers accelerated in the mid-1980s, Skadden swelled to 500 attorneys, then passed 1,000 in 1990, all without merging with another firm. As it grew, Skadden’s ratio of associates to partners (its leverage) rose to the highest ratio of any firm in the nation, with at least four associates toiling under each partner.

The scale of hiring presented a challenge: there were simply not enough students graduating at the top of their classes from top law schools each year. Nationally, bar associations kept a tight lid on the number of accredited schools and overall enrolments. In 1987, the total size of the first-year law-school class was smaller than it had been at the start of the decade, even as demand skyrocketed. That year, 700 firms visited the campus of Harvard Law School, where they competed to recruit a graduating class that numbered just 500. Meanwhile, Skadden was growing by 140 lawyers per year, nearly the size of Yale Law’s entire class. The supply of top graduates – particularly those who fit the white-shoe demographic profile of Nordic Protestants – was not keeping up with firms’ demand for entry-level labour.

Large numbers of new Skadden associates graduated not from Harvard or Yale but a Catholic university in the Bronx

Skadden, less hampered by the pretentions of its WASP competitors, decided to broaden its search. Black and Asian, white-ethnic and Latino, men and women: as long as they could handle the gruelling hours that mergers work required, Skadden would happily hire them.

Partners earnestly believed that expanding their recruiting would let them tap overlooked pools of talent. In the 1940s, Joe Flom had been passed over by WASP firms because of his religion. Now, his firm would hire promising young graduates regardless of their ethnic or educational pedigree. From 1979 to 1984, the largest number of new Skadden associates graduated not from Harvard or Yale but from Fordham, a Catholic university in the Bronx. A similar number came from New York University, which was known, but not particularly esteemed, for training upwardly mobile Jewish students. In earlier decades, their graduates would have been hired at lower-tier firms handling less-prestigious work. But, as Skadden grew, it realised that the lower rungs of the educational ladder offered a ready supply of capable young attorneys.

Soon, Skadden outpaced WASP firms in recruiting minority and female graduates. By 1984, it had the highest number of Black associates at any New York firm – even if the total, nine out of 254, remained minuscule. (That year, Cravath still had zero Black associates.) In the 1980s, it was only one of a tiny handful of New York firms to have a Black partner. Skadden was also a leader in hiring women: in 1988, nearly 30 per cent of associates were female.

Skadden presented itself as proudly and ruthlessly meritocratic. In the 1980s, women, white ethnics and racial minorities had only recently won, through dogged and liberationist political movements, acceptance into the WASP-dominated professional world. Skadden’s message was music to their ears. They had fought for the right, as their thinking went, to distinguish themselves on the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. After law school, Nancy Lieberman chose to work at Skadden specifically because of its diversity, which showed her that it ‘wasn’t bound by the blueblood traditions of Wall Street’. Lieberman felt that, at a fiercely transactional firm like Skadden, gender was not an issue. ‘I never had an issue here with being a woman. It doesn’t matter if you’re male, female, orange or purple,’ she said in The Skadden Story: An Autobiography (2014). ‘All anybody cares about is whether you can do the work.’ Roger Aaron, Skadden’s partner in charge of hiring, agreed. ‘The notion of meritocracy is built into everything we do,’ he said. ‘We’re not who we are because of our Social Register rankings. We’re who we are because we do great legal work.’

Just as Skadden enjoyed a first-mover advantage by doing the takeover work that Cravath and its ilk refused, hiring women and minorities along with graduates from lower-ranked schools was simply good business, Aaron seemed to say. Skadden and its fellow ‘sweatshops’ could profit from financialisation, then, because of their willingness to hire any talented associate. This was the ironic flipside of hiring discrimination: it created a huge pool of untapped talent that firms could exploit when conditions were ripe.

Once they arrived in New York, that diverse crop of associates would be asked to work much harder than the WASPs they supplanted. In the exclusionary mid-century, white-shoe firms had been managed shambolically as professional partnerships. But in the 1980s, they began to bring in outside business experts – accountants and MBAs, most without law degrees – to streamline their business processes and wring more profit out of their diversifying workforces.

In 1980, Skadden was the first New York firm to bring in a non-lawyer – Earle Yaffa, hired from the accounting firm Arthur Young, with MBA (management) and CPA (accounting) qualifications – as managing director. Skadden ‘had grown so fast and furious that part-time surveillance [by partners] was woefully inadequate,’ Yaffa told me. Secretaries and lawyers had long written down billable hours on paper slips, then stuffed those slips, sometimes unsorted, into their desk drawers. Yaffa’s first move was to hire a computer programmer to create a system that tracked each associate’s time slips. ‘Once you put that into a computer,’ remembers Yaffa, ‘then it became very easy to keep track of how busy people were and what they were doing.’ Now, each month, an associate could be handed a ‘utilisation report’: a printout detailing just how many hours they’d billed, and how close they were to meeting ‘100 per cent utilisation’, an ideal figured based on a fictional associate who took no vacations, sick days, and bathroom or lunch breaks.

Under this new arrangement, associates were overworked to the point of exhaustion. Like soldiers in wartime, they developed a peculiar sense of pride while toiling on takeover deals. At some point in the 1980s, associates at Skadden originated the ‘Beast of Burden’ prize. It was given monthly to a peer who had worked the most hours and received the most abuse. Extra points were awarded when an associate had endured a partner’s verbal tirade. One Skadden associate billed an average of 350 hours per month – or 12 hours every day, including weekends – when working on four successive mergers. After he quit the firm, he framed his computerised billings sheet as a reminder that he had ‘survived boot camp’. ‘I was away [on business] 24 days a month,’ he told an interviewer. ‘It was a miserable lifestyle.’

Astronomical entry-level compensation made it too costly to spend time training young associates

Soon, the management techniques that Skadden pioneered spread to all the top firms – Jewish, mixed and WASP alike. By 1991, a study by the ABA’s Young Lawyers Division found that, armed with these new forms of surveillance, partners and their non-attorney managers resembled less the ‘enlightened corporate executive or professional, but rather the industrial manager in the earlier years of the Industrial Revolution.’ Of course, it wasn’t exactly a 19th-century mill. Lawyers were paid handsomely for their work – roughly double the median US household income. Entry-level associate salaries rose to $65,000 in 1986 (nearly $200,000 today).

But those soaring salaries created an ironic situation: astronomical entry-level compensation meant that it would have been too costly to spend time training young associates. Far from ennobling lawyers’ labour, bigger transactions and larger salaries encouraged their de-skilling. Takeover deals moved so fast and were so lucrative that it was more profitable to bill associates’ hours to a client than it was to slow down to tutor them in the finer points of dealmaking.

In the more competitive, faster-moving and richer new world of the 1980s, law firms realised that one-on-one tutelage consumed very valuable time – time that couldn’t be billed to clients. As one partner explained: ‘No one wanted to spoon-feed a 24-year-old making $85,000 a year.’ Instead of understanding how their assignment belonged to a larger legal strategy, associates were given piecework. Much of it was surprisingly menial. One sociologist described 1980s big-law associates doing mainly ‘clerical tasks, such as filing documents at the SEC [Securities Exchange Commission], proofreading, document organisation, and general “go-foring”.’ Teams of first-year associates would sit in windowless conference rooms, proofreading merger documents or comparing drafts of financing agreements. As the ratio of associates to partners passed four to one, few associates had the chance to even see the lead partner at all. Instead, they took orders from a senior associate who played the role of foreman. It was a far cry from the clubby mentorship of decades past.

By the end of the 1980s, the takeover boom left law firms larger and more diverse, but also much worse places to work. These firms, just like the banks and consultancies they worked with, needed legions of exploitable workers at the very same moment when the reservoir of graduates finally included white women and minority men and women. The diversification of the US professional class, then, wasn’t just due to social movement victories. It was also profitable.

Once at those elite firms, studies found, women and minority attorneys worked longer, with less guidance from senior partners, in the most routinised practice areas. And they faced the worst chances of enjoying the deferred compensation that came with making partner. Female associates who cut back their hours for care obligations found themselves shunted onto the ‘mommy track’, a fate that guaranteed they would never attain partnership. At the end of the 1980s, women made up 33 per cent of all associates at large firms, but only 9 per cent of partners. Meanwhile, Black associates fought stereotypes as they struggled to find mentors who would shepherd them toward partnership. Throughout the decade, the number of Black partners in New York remained so small that they could comfortably fit around a single table at their annual luncheon.

With working conditions so dire, it was remarkable that young attorneys continued to stream into firms like Skadden. Why did they do it?

Many associates reported that becoming a lawyer had not been a fully conscious choice, but something of a stalling tactic. Once they were enrolled at a prestigious university, going to law school was a good way to leverage their protean skills while deferring hard choices about what exactly they wanted to do with their lives. The path was even more enticing for students from minority or immigrant backgrounds who had long been denied access to the upper echelons of the legal world and lacked other on-ramps to professional employment.

Access to the rarefied world of a white-shoe firm seemed like fair compensation for sacrificing their idealism

Patrick Griffin was one of those indecisive students at the University of Michigan in the late 1970s. Ambitious but undirected, he took courses across the humanities and social sciences. Griffin and his ilk were ‘bright, certainly, and often glib’, and ‘perform[ed] well on written tests.’ But they ‘didn’t know how to do anything.’ Almost by default, he took the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and enrolled at Harvard Law School. ‘The law degree,’ he wrote in a 1992 essay in the Chicago Reader, had ‘become the degree of choice for all those who would rather not make any irrevocable choices; who lack unshakable convictions about what, if anything, they want to do with their lives; who could use some time, some room, some psychic slack.’ According to undergraduate career counsellors, many students believed that a law degree offered ‘flexibility’ – a credential that could be repurposed in nearly any career.

But once they arrived at law school, students were inevitably drawn into large firms’ recruiting programmes. With its insatiable demand for qualified graduates, corporate law became the path of least resistance. Many of Griffin’s classmates who had hoped to become public interest lawyers realised that competition for those jobs was tougher and the pay was lower than at a Wall Street firm. Saddled with debt, they needed a steady salary. And soon they were barraged with lucrative offers for summer associate opportunities. Access to the rarefied world of a white-shoe firm seemed like fair compensation for sacrificing their idealism. The high pay – significantly more than any other job save investment banking – didn’t hurt, either. Then, during the second-year recruiting season, the big-law offers started to roll in.

Once they joined those firms, however, they realised how bad things had gotten. Associates, reported Griffin, lived in ‘an atmosphere of “pure fear”, never seeing their families, dining at their desks’. Instead of the heady intellectual debates of law schools, they toiled over minutiae: ‘narrow aims, trivialities, tiny subparts of subsections of securities regulations, things too small even to describe to a normal person.’ One of Griffin’s friends, an associate at a large firm, put it bluntly: ‘He tells of routine 14-hour days … Of being deprived of any sense of control over his life. Of feeling literally like a slave, and not even a very productive one.’

Many would regret their choice. More often than not, they would quit, like so many others who drifted into law or were enticed by promises of high pay. More and more, Griffin noticed, the lawyers he knew felt similarly. They were ‘trapped in the profession, like crabs in a tide pool’, skittering against a rising tide of proletarianisation. Good salaries couldn’t persuade them to keep enduring the crushing hours. By 1990, the five-year attrition rate at large firms would rise above 80 per cent. At Skadden, the best estimates were even higher. Few, if any, would do it all over again.

Yet, for the women and minoritised associates just breaking into the professions, the promises of meritocratic advancement still outweighed the downsides. Equal opportunity, however compromised, was still a prize. They certainly didn’t want to go back to the old days of exclusive WASP firms.

There were also fewer and fewer alternatives. By the 1990s and 2000s, law’s labour revolution had spread to other professions. Doctors, academics, consultants, bankers and journalists – careers that had been insulated from the most savage forms of labour exploitation – watched their independence erode as management became more profit-driven and bureaucratic. To take just one example: in medicine, corporate consolidation, especially under private equity ownership, has remade the field over the past three decades. Doctors report feeling stripped of their autonomy. Patient visits are now graded on a metric of ‘relative value units’, which prizes speed and revenues but leaves little room for care that could not be billed to a patient’s insurance provider. For one emergency physician, corporatisation has robbed her work of its higher purpose. ‘It’s all about the almighty dollar and all about productivity,’ she told The New York Times Magazine in 2023, ‘which is obviously not why most of us sign up to do the job.’ Professionals have less autonomy and less free time than ever.

Across the white-collar world, workers have become both essential and disposable. As a group, they are vital to grow firms and generate profits. But as individuals, they are utterly expendable. The dynamic was already apparent to those covering the legal industry back in the 1980s. As the journalist Ruth Marcus wrote at the time: ‘Major law firms today resemble the monster plant in Little Shop of Horrors, with an incessant, increasing need to devour young lawyers to [feed] the fast-growing … firm.’ You might say the same thing today about banking analysts, nurses, retail clerks or university teaching assistants.

As lawyers’ work grew more stultifying, the consequences for the rest of the US economy were even worse. Hour by billable hour, big-law associates served as the foot soldiers for a legal industry that helped corporations to pursue short-term financial gains – benefitting shareholders while shirking responsibilities to everyone else.

As financialisation galloped across the economy, corporations decimated their blue-collar workforces. Unionised workers were particularly hard hit, laid off either as the result of a takeover or in efforts to temporarily boost stock prices to avert one. In 1982, a new term was added to the American Heritage Dictionary: ‘downsizing’. One-third of US households saw someone laid off between 1980 and 1996, reported The New York Times in a series of articles eulogising the ‘millions of casualties’ of downsizing. Robert Muse, an aircraft machinist from Southern California, was 47 years old when he lost his job in 1994 after a merger. Two years later, he worked in maintenance, unclogging toilets and trimming trees for half his former salary. ‘I know nothing is for sure in this life,’ he told a reporter. ‘But I spent 30 years at it. That should count for something. Now there’s just a void.’

Lawyers’ misery was a side-effect of a mechanism that generated enormous profits while spreading insecurity to everyone else

It wasn’t just takeovers. Legal associates were also hard at work on other value-extracting strategies, including a raft of ‘strategic’ bankruptcies. After US Congress loosened the federal bankruptcy code in 1978, large firms, previously hesitant to handle this ignoble work, rushed to hire new associates and cash in. As one member of Congress remarked, the legislation was a ‘full employment bill for lawyers’. Bankruptcy had once been the last resort for desperate companies. Now, corporate lawyers advised their clients that they could file to pre-emptively write off debts or escape union claims for wages and pensions. In 1983, Continental Airlines did exactly that: it declared bankruptcy, thus voiding its union contracts, even though it had many millions in assets. By 1985, Continental had fired thousands of workers and cut the share of its operating costs for labour by nearly 40 per cent. By 1987, the number of Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings nationwide had risen by 500 per cent. An army of overworked associates had spent countless billable hours toiling over each one – extracting profits from the husks of industrial companies, but destabilising the structures that had provided stable employment for workers.

Lawyers’ misery was a side-effect of a mechanism that generated enormous profits while spreading insecurity to everyone else. That it all took place under a banner of meritocracy made it no less insidious – only harder to see. But make no mistake: while financialisation cracked open the door to a more diverse professional class, it immiserated the very white-collar workers who were tasked with remaking the US economy.

Since the 1980s, the demands on young professionals have only grown. While the money is good, the life isn’t so idyllic. Among the bankers putting in 100-hour weeks on Wall Street, it’s not uncommon for some to collapse from exhaustion. A 2021 internal survey of Goldman Sachs analysts found that they routinely work 16-hour days, face abuse from superiors, and experience adverse health consequences. Asked to describe their job, one young banker rattled off a grim litany: ‘The sleep deprivation, the treatment by senior bankers, the mental and physical stress … I’ve been through foster care and this is arguably worse.’

The logic of brutal disposability, which professionals helped to visit on rank-and-file workers in the US, has boomeranged back into their laps. Now those at the top of the meritocratic ladder – legions of consultants, bankers, doctors and lawyers – don’t feel triumphant. They feel burnt out.

This is an edited extract from Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York by Dylan Gottlieb, published by Harvard University Press in May 2026.

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