Described as “legendary” by The New Yorker and as having "something approaching rock star status” by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is a scholar of social inequality and Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) at University of California Law San Francisco. Her 12 books have been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Hungarian and Danish. She has published academic work in law, sociology, social psychology and management journals.

Williams’ influential work on class includes Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back (2025), nominated for the Financial Times’ Best Business Book of the Year, White Working Class (2017), and her 2016 Harvard Business Review article, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class,” which garnered 3.7 million views. She has published on class dynamics in American politics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Politico, The Hill, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. With Jared Abbott of the Center for Working Class Politics, she is co-author of the forthcoming, “The Left’s Coalition Crisis: Understanding the Massive Divide Between Working Class and College Educated Voters, and How to Bridge It” and “The Working Class Win-o-meter: Dialing Up to Victory.”