Lenstra writes that "Gene would invariably comment that this is why a world with two sexes has been devised." During the 1970s, Lawler made great headway in systematizing algorithms for job shop scheduling. His 1979 survey on the subject introduced the three-field notation for theoretic scheduling problems, which (despite the existence of earlier notations) became standard in the study of scheduling algorithms. Another later survey is also highly cited (over 1000 citations each in Google scholar). In the late 1980s, Lawler shifted his research focus to problems of computational biology, including the reconstruction of evolutionary trees and several works on sequence alignment. In Spring 1969, while on sabbatical in Berkeley, Lawler took part in a protest against the Vietnam War that led to the arrests of 483 protesters, including Lawler; Richard Karp bailed him out. Karp recalls Lawler as "the social conscience of the CS Division, always looking out for the welfare of students and especially concerned for women, minorities and handicapped students". A special issue of the journal "Mathematical Programming" (vol. 82, issues 1–2) was dedicated in Lawler's honor in 1998. The ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery every two years for "humanitarian contributions within computer science and informatics".