When does crime become work—and why does the legal system recognize some harmful activities as legitimate labor while criminalizing other activities undertaken to secure food, shelter, safety, or family survival?
Yvette Butler, Professor of Law at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, joins Kim Krawiec and UVA Law student cohosts Virginia Pillion and Sahanya Bhaktaram to discuss Butler’s article, Survival Labor.
The conversation explores the line between survival crime and survival labor; sex work, trafficking, and nonfinancial forms of necessity; what counts as a realistic alternative for someone acting under severe economic pressure; and whether the constitutional “right to earn a living” can protect marginalized workers without undermining labor regulation. Butler also discusses epistemic exclusion from lawmaking, remedies for people harmed by survival labor, the limits of universal basic income, and the unsettling contrast between criminalized workers and state-paid executioners.
Reading discussed in or especially relevant to the episode
- Yvette Butler, Survival Labor, 112 California Law Review 403 (2024).
- Yvette Butler, Silencing the Sex Worker, 71 UCLA Law Review 726 (2024).
- Yvette Butler, Traditionally Suspect: Common Occupations and the Right to Earn a Living.
- Kimberly D. Krawiec, Repugnant Work, in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Work (2026).
- Yvette Butler, Epistemic Appropriation, Critical Defanging, and Lessons for a Responsive New Reconstruction, 105 Boston University Law Review 1239 (2025).
- Yvette Butler, Academic Freedom, Knowledge Erasure, and the Right to Earn a Living.
- William E. Forbath, The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age, 1985 Wisconsin Law Review 767.