Digital Commons Network^™

Cognitive Illiberalism And Debiasing Strategies, Paul Secunda

Paul M. Secunda

Legal realist scholars of a generation ago posited that judicial perception of facts reflect previously-held values and assumptions rather than record evidence. Yet crucially those scholars did not describe the psychological mechanism by which judges’ values come to shape facts. Understanding the psychological mechanism, culturally-motivated cognition, is a necessary first step to counteract the impact of cognitive illiberalism. Cognitive illiberalism results from the manner in which legal decisionmakers explain their decisions, and how those explanations are processed by “losers” in the politico-legal wars of our society. The phenomenon of cognitive illiberalism delegitimizes legal decisions and causes societal discontent with the …

The Forgotten Employee Benefit Crisis: Multiemployer Benefit Plans On The Brink, Paul M. Secunda

Paul M. Secunda

This article provides a first time look at the numerous challenges facing multiemployer or Taft-Hartley benefit plans in the post-global recession and health care reform world. These plans have provided pension, health, and welfare benefits to union members of smaller employers in itinerant industries for over sixty years and even today, these plans collectively have over ten million participants in over 1500 plans.

Multiemployer plans are increasingly mired in financial trouble and are finding it more difficult to continue to provide adequate retirement and health benefits to their members. Although they once represented one of the great triumphs in American …