Law Commons^™

The Ragged Edge Of Rugged Individualism: Wage Theft And The Personalization Of Social Harm, Matthew Fritz-Mauer

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Every year, millions of low-wage workers suffer wage theft when their employers refuse to pay them what they have earned. Wage theft is both prevalent and highly impactful. It costs individuals thousands each year in unpaid earnings, siphons tens of billions of dollars from low-income communities, depletes the government of necessary resources, distorts the competitive labor market, and causes significant personal harm to its victims. In recent years, states and cities have passed new laws to attack the problem. These legal changes are important. They are also, broadly speaking, failing the people they are supposed to protect.

This Article fills …

Tell Me How It Ends: The Path To Nationalizing The U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry, Fran Quigley

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The U.S. medicines system is broken. Millions of Americans suffer and some even die because they cannot afford medicines discovered by government-funded research. At the same time, corporations holding monopoly patent rights to those medicines collect some of the largest profits in modern capitalist history.

It does not have to be this way. The global legacy of treating essential medicines as a public good and the robust U.S. history of government seizure of private property for the public interest reveals a better path: the United States should nationalize its pharmaceutical industry.

U.S. statutory law already provides broad powers for the …

Tortious Interference With The Expectancy Of Entitlement Benefits, Paul Caritj

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note proposes a new tort to address employers' and their agents' increasing abuse of the Unemployment Insurance appeals process, which interferes with employees' expectancy of entitlement benefits. Though existing state Unemployment Compensation statutes sanction both unemployed workers claiming benefits and employers for making fraudulent statements, these provisions approach the issue of fraud too narrowly to combat this growing problem. Meanwhile, no existing remedy properly compensates victims of this sort of abuse, adequately deters abusive behavior by scaling the penalty to the harm, and is accessible to economically disadvantaged plaintiffs. As well as providing an analysis of the specific problem …