Law Commons^™

Introduction To Thinking About A Post-Aca World: Litigation, Cost Shifting And Enforcement Of Statutory Rights, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

At its annual gathering in 2016, members of the Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation and Law, Medicine and Healthcare Sections of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) jointly sponsored a discussion of the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) following the Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell.' What follows are the papers generated for the panel discussion. The panelists² were asked to evaluate the future of the ACA from a distinct perspective.

College Football Coaches' Pay And Contracts: Are They Overpaid And Unduly Privileged?, Randall S. Thomas, R. Lawrence Van Horn

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

College football coaches' employment contracts and compensation garner public attention and scrutiny in much the same way as those of corporate CEOs. In both cases, the public perception is that they must be overpaid and pampered Economic theory claims that for coaches and CEOs to be overpaid, they must be receiving compensation in excess of the value they create for their organizations. However, both receive pay-for-performance compensation, which structurally aligns their compensation with value creation. This means we need to examine the underlying structure of the contract that gives rise to the observed compensation to determine whether they are appropriately …

The Knowledge Gap In Workplace Retirement Investing And The Role Of Professional Advisors, Jill E. Fisch, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, Kristin Firth

All Faculty Scholarship

The dramatic shift from traditional pension plans to participant-directed 401(k) plans has increased the decision-making responsibility of individual investors for their own retirement planning. With this shift comes increasing evidence that investors are making poor decisions in choosing how much to save for retirement and in selecting among their investment options. Studies question the value of efforts to improve these decisions through regulatory reforms or investor education.

This article posits that deficiencies in workplace retirement savings cannot be adequately addressed until the reasons for poor investment decisions are better understood. We report the results of a study designed to simulate …

Political Decision-Making At The National Labor Relations Board: An Empirical Examination Of The Board's Unfair Labor Practice Disputes Through The Clinton And Bush Ii Years, Amy Semet

Journal Articles

Does partisan ideology influence the voting of members of multi-member adjudicatory bodies at “independent agencies”? In studying the federal circuit courts of appeals, scholars have found that results of cases vary depending upon the partisan composition of the particular panel hearing a case. Few scholars to date, however, have systematically studied whether partisan panel effects occur in administrative adjudication. In this Article, I explore the impact that partisan ideology and panel composition have on the vote choices of an administrative agency rumored to be one of the most partisan: the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”). Employing an original dataset of …

Gig Economy: Settlements Leave Labor Issues Unsettled, Miriam A. Cherry

All Faculty Scholarship

This short paper, which appeared on the Law360 blog, is an effort to think through the consequences of the proposed April 2016 settlement of the Uber drivers' lawsuits. This paper makes reference to the special issue of the Journal of Comparative Labor Law & Policy that is dedicated to the legal and economic issuessurrounding crowdwork.

Hidden From View: Disability, Segregation And Work, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

The employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 were intended to bring working-age people with disabilities into the workplace by providing options for them to seek and gain meaningful, integrated employment. Although the ADA has made significant gains, the rate of progress in employment has been disappointing. While the lack of progress of people with disabilities in the traditional workplace has received attention, the work done by many, especially those with severe disabilities in segregated workplaces, remains hidden in sheltered workshops. This chapter explores the intersection of the concepts of disability, invisibility, and work and identifies the …

Criminal Labor Law, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article examines a recent rise in suits brought against unions under criminal statutes. By looking at the long history of criminal regulation of labor, the Article argues that these suits represent an attack on the theoretical underpinnings of post-New Deal U.S. labor law and an attempt to revive a nineteenth century conception of unions as extortionate criminal conspiracies. The Article further argues that this criminal turn is reflective of a broader contemporary preference for finding criminal solutions to social and economic problems. In a moment of political gridlock, parties seeking regulation increasingly do so via criminal statute. In this …

Rwu Law: The Magazine Of Roger Williams University School Of Law (Issue 9) (2016), Roger Williams University School Of Law

RWU Law

No abstract provided.

Nurturing Wings Or Clipping Them Off: The Philippine Approach To Female Labor Migration And A Potentially Redeeming Role For The Commission On Human Rights, Emily Sanchez Salcedo

Center for Business Research and Development

The large-scale migration of Filipino workers started in the 1970’s as inadequate local employment and livelihood opportunities pointed to overseas opportunities in the booming economy of oil-rich countries in the Middle East. Though initially dominated by male construction workers and seafarers, female migrant workers, mostly in the health care professions, in domestic services and in the entertainment industry, followed suit and, in the most recent available statistical report, have even slightly outnumbered the men. As of the end of 2014, 50.43% of the 2.32 million overseas Filipino workers are women. Collectively, these overseas workers sent about 27 billion dollars in …

Workplace Law Cases In The Tenth Term Of The Roberts Court: Between The Usual Ideological Lines, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

My review of the Supreme Court's October 2014 Term will focus on cases involving workplace law statutes such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (LMRA) and the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 (WPA). These cases can be viewed through the lens of the following trends: 1) the Court continues its judicial narrowing of the Fair Labor Standards Act and federal labor law; 2) plaintiffs who have the backing of the administrative agencies are more likely to be successful; and …

And Ain't I A Woman: Feminism, Immigrant Caregivers, And New Frontiers For Equality, Shirley Lin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Equality, Non-Discrimination And Work-Life Balance In Canada, Eric Tucker, Alec Stromdahl

Articles & Book Chapters

The principle that everyone has a right to equal treatment was first entrenched in Canadian law in the aftermath of the Second World War when legislation began to be enacted prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, race and religion. Since that time, the grounds of prohibited discrimination have steadily increased. These grounds will be discussed in greater detail in the answer to question 1. Because Canada is a federal state and courts have held that legislative authority over human rights is primarily a matter of provincial jurisdiction, there is no uniform law of Canada. Nevertheless, the provisions of statutory …

The Two Laws Of Sex Stereotyping, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

This Article offers two main contributions to the study of sex stereotyping. First, it identifies an organizing principle that explains why some forms of sex stereotyping are today legally prohibited while others are not. Second, it argues for a shift in the current rights framework—from equal opportunity to individual liberty—that could assist courts and other legal actors to appreciate the harms of currently permissible forms of sex stereotyping. Commentators and courts have long observed that the law of sex stereotyping has many inconsistencies. For instance, it is lawful today for the state to require that unwed biological fathers, but not …

People Analytics And Invisible Labor, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In recent years, I have been writing about two increasingly salient labor and employment law issues: the presence of invisible labor and the rise of people analytics.' First, invisible labor could include emotion work, such as being a colleague's "work wife," or could include "identity work" that is time and effort spent on making others feel comfortable with the worker. Invisible labor might also include uncompensated time spent in "looking good" and "sounding right." It could also include instances where technology obscures work that is being done through a website platform or mobile application. The second trend is …

When The Customer Is King: Employment Discrimination As Customer Service, Lu-In Wang

Articles

Employers profit from giving customers opportunities to discriminate against service workers. Employment discrimination law should not, but in many ways does, allow them to get away with it. Employers are driven by self-interest to please customers, whose satisfaction is critical to business success and survival. Pleasing customers often involves cultivating and catering to their discriminatory expectations with respect to customer service — including facilitating customers’ direct discrimination against workers.

Current doctrine allows employers to escape responsibility for customers’ discrimination against workers because it takes an overly narrow view of the employment relationship. The doctrine focuses on the formal lines of …

Authority And Authors And Codes, Michael J. Madison

Articles

Contests over the meaning and application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) expose long-standing, complex questions about the sources and impacts of the concept of authority in law and culture. Accessing a computer network “without authorization” and by “exceeding authorized access” is forbidden by the CFAA. Courts are divided in their interpretation of this language in the statute. This Article first proposes to address the issue with an insight from social science research. Neither criminal nor civil liability under the CFAA should attach unless the alleged violator has transgressed some border or boundary that is rendered visible …

The New Labor Law, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

Labor law is failing. Disfigured by courts, attacked by employers, and rendered inapt by a global and fissured economy, many of labor law’s most ardent proponents have abandoned it altogether. And for good reason: the law that governs collective organization and bargaining among workers has little to offer those it purports to protect. Several scholars have suggested ways to breathe new life into the old regime, yet their proposals do not solve the basic problem. Labor law developed for the New Deal does not provide solutions to today’s inequities. But all hope is not lost. From the remnants of the …

The Future Of The Cadillac Tax, Kathryn L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Affordable Care Act includes a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health care coverage. Often referred to as the “Cadillac tax,” this excise tax is one of the most controversial elements of the Affordable Care Act.

Currently scheduled to go into effect in 2020, the Cadillac tax poses serious challenges and uncertainty for employers. On the one hand, recent estimates suggest that the Cadillac tax may hit as many as 20 percent of employers with health care plans in 2020. On the other hand, there is a serious question as to whether the tax will be repealed before …

A More Fundamental Distinction For The Contemporary Economy Between Employee And Independent Contractor Status, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

The common law remains an intellectual battle ground in Anglo-American legal systems, even in the current age of statutes. This is true in significant part because the common law provides legitimacy for arguments actually based on policy, ideology, and interest. It also is true because of the common law's malleability and related susceptibility to significantly varied interpretations.

Mere contention over the meaning of the common law to provide legitimacy for modern statutes is most often not productive of sensible policy, however. It generally produces no more than reified doctrine unsuited for problems the common law was not framed to solve. …

Politics At Work After Citizens United, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

There are seismic changes going on in the political system. The United States Supreme Court has constitutionalized the concentration of political power in the "one percent" in several recent decisions, including Citizens United v. FEC. At the same time, unions are representing a shrinking share of the workforce, and their political power is also being diminished. In order for unions to recalibrate the balance of political power at all, they must collaborate with grassroots community groups, as they have done in several recent campaigns. There are, however, various legal structures that make coordination between unions and nonunion groups difficult, …

"An Equally Divided Court": Workplace Law In The U.S. Supreme Court 2015-2016, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

The 2015-2016 Term of the United States Supreme Court was scarcely halfway over when Justice Antonin Scalia passed away on February 12, 2016. This event and the political gridlock over his successor defined the Term in some ways more than the actual decisions of the Court, particularly when the resulting vacancy led an “equally divided” Supreme Court to affirm the courts below in a one sentence judgment. The most watched of these cases in workplace law was Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, where the Supreme Court’s 4-4 tie avoided the overruling of decades of precedent upholding the constitutionality of agency …

Subsidized Egg Freezing In Employment: Autonomy, Coercion, Or Discrimination?, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

In 2014, Apple and Facebook announced that they would provide up to $20,000 for female employees to freeze their eggs as an employment benefit. These announcements raised mixed reviews. Some applauded the decision because they believe that egg freezing may offer to women more control over their reproductive choices. Others argued that the new benefit sends the wrong message to women and that encouraging good parenting by giving better parental leave and child care policies would be more beneficial to families. Others were concerned that this “benefit” applies only to professional or managerial-class women, but may not be helpful to …

Controlling Health Care Spending: More Patient "Skin In The Game?", David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor Orentlicher explores the high cost of healthcare and the trend in health insurance to shift the cost of health care to patients in an attempt to influence their behavior and health decisions. He examines such strategies as reference pricing, scaled cost-sharing, and employee wellness programs.

Madonnas And Whores In The Workplace, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Much has been written about “lookism” – the preferential treatment given to those who conform to societal standards of beauty. But in a recent case before the Iowa Supreme Court, a gender discrimination plaintiff alleged a sort of “reverse-lookism,” claiming that her male employer terminated her long-term employment because the employee was too physically attractive, thus tempting the employer to think about entering into an extramarital affair. To the great surprise of many who followed this case, the Iowa Supreme Court sided with the employer, declining to find him liable for gender discrimination. As one might expect, uproar ensued, with …

Lifetime Disadvantage, Susan Bisom-Rapp, Malcolm Sargeant

Faculty Scholarship

Lifetime Disadvantage, Discrimination and the Gendered Workforce fills a gap in the literature on discrimination and disadvantage suffered by women at work by focusing on the inadequacies of the current law and the need for a new holistic approach. Each stage of the working life cycle for women is examined with a critical consideration of how the law attempts to address the problems that inhibit women's labor force participation. By using their model of lifetime disadvantage, the authors show how the law adopts an incremental and disjointed approach to resolving the challenges, and argue that a more holistic orientation towards …

The Jocks And The Justice: How Sotomayor Restrained College Athletes, Phillip J. Closius

All Faculty Scholarship

Two judicial opinions have shaped the modem college athletic world. NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma declared the NCAA's exclusive control over the media rights to college football violated the Sherman Act. That decision allowed universities and conferences to control their own media revenue and laid the foundation for the explosion of coverage and income in college football today. Clarett v. NFL held that the provision then in the National Football League's (NFL) Constitution and By-Laws that prohibited players from being eligible for the NFL draft until three years from the date of their high school …

Inside The Taft Court: Lessons From The Docket Books, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

For many years, the docket books kept by certain of the Taft Court Justices have been held by the Office of the Curator of the Supreme Court. Though the existence of these docket books had been brought to the attention of the scholarly community, access to them was highly restricted. In April of 2014, however, the Court adopted new guidelines designed to increase access to the docket books for researchers. This article offers a report and analysis based on a review of all of the Taft Court docket books held by the Office of the Curator, which are the only …

Labor And Employment Law At The 2014-2015 Supreme Court: The Court Devotes Ten Percent Of Its Docket To Statutory Interpretation In Employment Cases, But Rejects The Argument That What Employment Law Really Needs Is More Administrative Law, Scott A. Moss

Publications

No abstract provided.

Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias

Articles

In the last few years, scholars have sought to revitalize a range of constitutional arguments against mounting economic inequality and in favor of labor rights. They urge contemporary worker movements to lay claim to the Constitution. But worker movements, for the most part, have not done so. This Essay takes seriously that choice. It examines reasons for the absence of constitutional argumentation by contemporary worker movements, particularly the role of courts and legal elites in our constitutional system, and it contends that labor’s ongoing statutory and regulatory reform efforts are essential prerequisites to the development of progressive constitutional labor rights. …

Are College Presidents Like Football Coaches? Evidence From Their Employment Contracts, Randall Thomas, Lawrence R. Van Horn

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

College presidents and football coaches are frequently criticized for their high compensation. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms are unmerited, as the markets for both college presidents and football coaches exhibit properties consistent with a competitive labor market. Both parties compensation varies in sensible ways related to the size of the programs they manage, as well as their potential for value creation. Successful college presidents and football coaches can greatly increase the value of their schools well beyond the amount they receive in compensation. If these higher education executives' compensation is the result of a competitive labor market, …