Professor Samantha Prince quoted in Bloomberg Law article about New Jersey Amazon case

CARLISLE, Pa.—Professor Samantha Prince was quoted in a recent Bloomberg Law article entitled “NJ Amazon Suit Vies to Build on States’ Limited Gig Worker Wins.”

Worker classification is what determines worker entitlements and protections. If a worker is an employee, they are entitled to protection under labor and wage laws, unemployment benefits, and a host of others. If a worker is an independent contractor, they are not afforded such protections.

Gig drivers such as those for Amazon Flex, Uber, DoorDash, and Lyft have been treated by their respective companies as independent contractors. In an effort to correct purported misclassification of these drivers, many states have sued these gig companies. New Jersey is one such state that endeavors to hold companies accountable and, more specifically to this article, correct Amazon Flex driver misclassification.

The article credits Prince with noting, “Regulators and attorneys general rarely, if ever, win wholesale reclassification of a company’s drivers as employees, particularly at a large corporation like Amazon.”

It went on to quote Prince as saying there is a growing track record of “being able to at least take a bite at the apple and get some benefit for them that’s typically only available to employees.” She referred to examples of smaller wins in Wisconsin and Virginia related solely to unemployment benefits in 2024 and 2025.

Prince has written and spoken extensively about gig workers. She is regularly contacted by reporters to answer questions in this developing area of the law. In 2022, she authored two articles on the subject, “The AB5 Experiment—Should States Adopt California’s Worker Classification Law?” and “The Shoe’s About to Drop for the Gig Economy: Understanding the Current Worker Classification Landscape in Preparation for a Changed World.”

Professor Samantha Prince is an associate professor of law. She has a Master of Laws in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center and was a partner in a regional law firm where she handled transactional matters that ranged from an initial public offering to regular representation of a publicly traded company. A significant part of her practice was in employee benefits, including retirement plan design and operation. Her expertise from practice has fueled her research, enabling her to become an expert on 401(k) vesting schedules, employee benefits transparency, and gig work. In practice, most of her clients were small- to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, including start-ups. Professor Prince brought her practice knowledge to the Law School and established the Penn State Dickinson Law entrepreneurship program. She is an advisor for the Entrepreneurship Law Certificate that is available to students and is the founder and moderator of the Inside Entrepreneurship Law blog.