Law Commons^™

Beyond The Glass Ceiling: Panes Of Equity Partnership, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article, prepared for a “micro-symposium” on Professor Kerri Stone’s monograph Panes of the Glass Ceiling (2022), explores the partnership pay gap in large law firms and the role of high-profile litigation in facilitating pay equity. There is a rich literature and extensive data on the gender attainment gap in elite law practice, particularly with regard to women’s attrition from practice and poor representation within the partnership ranks. Less attention has been paid to the way in which the exceptional women who achieve equity partner status continue to lag behind their male peers. This Article explores “Women v. BigLaw,” a …

To Report Or Not To Report: Data On School Law Enforcement, Student Discipline, Race, And The 'School-To-Prison Pipeline', Michael Heise, Jason P. Nance

UF Law Faculty Publications

The “school-to-prison pipeline” wreaks havoc on the lives of thousands of students each year, particularly with respect to students of color. While the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the school-to-prison pipeline remain unclear, the eventual return to full in-person teaching nationwide undoubtedly will renew this long-festering problem. The presence of law enforcement officers in schools is a key component of the school-to-prison pipeline and has generated considerable recent national attention, especially after George Floyd’s tragic death in the spring of 2020. Indeed, several robust empirical studies document that the increased presence of school resource (and/or police) officers in a …

Temporary Termination: A Layoff Law Blueprint For The Covid Era, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic led to Congress’ passage of two groundbreaking pieces of legislation, mitigating the financial toll on individuals unable to work due to the pandemic. The protections include: paid sick time, job protected leave for routine childcare, and expanded unemployment benefits. The current worker protection system affords insufficient rights in the event of an economic termination. The accommodations arising from the COVID-19 pandemic have long been demanded and could pave the way for enduring employment reform. This Article encourages the recognition of “temporary termination” for employees terminated for economic reasons. Arnow-Richman advocates for the following “temporary termination” rights: advance …

Disclosing Discrimination, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the United States, enforcement of laws prohibiting workplace discrimination rests almost entirely on the shoulders of employee victims, who must first file charges with a government agency and then pursue litigation themselves. While the law forbids retaliation against employees who complain, this does little to prevent it, in part because employees are also responsible for initiating any claims of retaliation they experience as a result of their original discrimination claims. The burden on employees to complain—and their justified fear of retaliation if they do so—results in underenforcement of the law and a failure to spot and redress underlying structural …

The New Enforcement Regime: Revisiting The Law Of Employee Competition (And The Scholarship Of Professor Charles Sullivan) With 2020 Vision, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article, prepared for Seton Hall Law School’s 2019 Symposium on the scholarship of Professor Charles Sullivan, labels and critiques “the new enforcement regime” in employee mobility law. For centuries, employee noncompetes have been regulated primarily through the common law rule of reason. The last decade, however, has witnessed a surge in public initiatives seeking to restrict employers’ use and enforcement of these agreements. They include proposed legislation, regulatory undertakings, class action litigation, and state enforcement programs that seek reforms ranging from an end to the use of noncompetes with vulnerable workers to the outright prohibition of all forms of …

Finding Balance, Forging A Legacy: Harassers’ Rights And Employer Best Practices In The Era Of Metoo, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article, prepared for the Annual Jack Pemberton Lecture on Workplace Justice, calls for the development of best practices for handling accused harassers in response to the MeToo movement. It contends that much of MeToo’s legacy will be determined by the voluntary choices of employers as they implement new policies and practices surrounding sexual harassment. It is therefore crucial that employers gain a better understanding of the nature and scope of sexual harassment and the risks of both over- and under-enforcement of anti-harassment norms. Through analysis of Harvey Weinstein’s final contract as Co-Chairman of the Weinstein Companies, the article juxtaposes …

The Politics Of Pregnancy Accommodation, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

How can antidiscrimination law treat men and women “equally” when it comes to the issue of pregnancy? The development of U.S. law on pregnancy accommodation in the workplace tells a story of both legal disagreements about the meaning of “equality” and political disagreements about how best to achieve “equality” at work for women. Federal law has prohibited sex discrimination in the workplace for over five decades. Yet, due to long held gender stereotypes separating work and motherhood, the idea that prohibiting sex discrimination requires a duty to accommodate pregnant workers is a relatively recent phenomenon—and still only partially required by …

Antidiscriminatory Algorithms, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

Can algorithms be used to advance equality goals in the workplace? A handful of legal scholars have raised concerns that the use of big data at work may lead to protected class discrimination that could fall outside the reach of current antidiscrimination law. Existing scholarship suggests that, because algorithms are “facially neutral,” they pose no problem of unequal treatment. As a result, algorithmic discrimination cannot be challenged using a disparate treatment theory of liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII). Instead, it presents a problem of unequal outcomes, subject to challenge using Title VII’s …

Of Power And Process: Handling Harassers In An At-Will World, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, companies have taken swift and severe disciplinary action against alleged harassers, raising questions in some instances as to whether their responses were justified. This Essay, prepared for the Yale L.J. Forum’s symposium on the sexual harassment scholarship of Professor Vicki Schultz, argues that balancing the goals of the #MeToo movement with principles of fairness to the accused demands attention to an overlooked aspect of the problem: the status of the alleged harasser. The background rule of employment at will, coupled with employer contracting practices and the law of sexual harassment itself, produces a …

Reckless Discrimination, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

If there are known, easily adopted ways to reduce bias in employment decisions, should an employer be held liable for discriminatory results when it fails to adopt such measures? Given the vast amount we now know about implicit bias and the ways to reduce it, to what extent is an employer who knowingly fails to do so engaging in intentional discrimination? This Article theorizes a “recklessness” model of discrimination under Title VII, arguing for liability where an employer acts with reckless disregard for the consequences of implicit bias and stereotyping in employment decisions. Legal scholars have argued that Title VII …

Modifying At-Will Employment Contracts, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

Long-term employment relationships are constantly in flux: terms of compensation, company policies, and a variety of other conditions of work are routinely altered over the course of an employee’s job. In cases involving at-will employment, the economic realities and power dynamics are such that changes in terms are likely to be introduced unilaterally by the employer, often without advance notice. To date, however, neither courts nor commentators have holistically considered this problem of “midterm modifications” - contractual documents imposed post-hire on implicit or explicit threat of termination. Bringing together the law of noncompetes, arbitration agreements, and employee handbooks, this Article …

Scaling Carnegie: Four Iterations Of Teaching Transactional Workplace Law Skills, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

The post-Recession demand for increased skills education in law school has spawned rich experimentation in course development and pedagogy. Less progress has been made, however, in developing holistic and sustainable curricula. Among the many challenges is the high per-student cost of delivering hands-on skills-oriented learning. The success of many law school initiatives to improve practice-readiness will depend in large part on the viability of merging skills education into the traditional large-class format. This published presentation, delivered at the Emory Law School Center for Transactional Law & Practice, examines four models of teaching transactional workplace law skills, based on the author’s …

Rights In Recession: Toward Administrative Antidiscrimination Law, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article documents how, over the past six years and coinciding with the “Great Recession of 2008,” both public and private antidiscrimination enforcement mechanisms have become increasingly constrained, such that the ability to enforce the mandate of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - the main federal law prohibiting employment discrimination - may be facing a crisis point. While enforcement mechanisms for federal antidiscrimination law have long left room for improvement, recent developments in the economy, due to the 2008 recession, and in federal case law, due to a series of procedural decisions by the Roberts Court, …

Work Wives, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

Traditional notions of male and female roles remain tenacious at home and work even in the face of gender-neutral family laws and robust employment discrimination laws. This Article analyzes the challenge of gender tenacity through the lens of the “work wife.” The continued use of the marriage metaphor at work reveals that the dynamics of marriage flow between home and work, creating a feedback loop that inserts gender into both domains in multiple ways. This phenomenon may reinforce gender stereotypes, hindering the potential of law to achieve gender equality. But such gender tenacity need not always lead to subordination. The …

Marital Status And Privilege, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay challenges the privilege attaching to marriage as a distinct form of relationship. Responding to Angela Onwuachi-Willig’s new book, According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family, the essay identifies the legal and extralegal privileges flowing not just to monoracial marriage but to marriage. States recognize and support one form of relationship between adults to the exclusion of all others, creating privilege that flows outside of the home into the workplace and beyond. Instead of arguing that such privilege should be distributed more equally between monoracial and multiracial couples, this essay seeks …

Intellectual Property And Employee Selection, Elizabeth A. Rowe

UF Law Faculty Publications

In today’s marketplace, companies from Disney to Hooters are increasingly integrating their image into the service that they provide. This has come to be known as “branded service.” The human wearing the trade dress merges with the brand image. When a company chooses this strategy to differentiate itself from its competitors in the marketplace, it will often incorporate some intellectual property, and the result then necessarily influences hiring decisions. If a business decides not to hire a prospective employee because she does not fit the company’s image, and that decision is challenged under the antidiscrimination laws, to what extent should …

Employment Law Inside Out: Using The Problem Method To Teach Workplace Law, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article, prepared for the Saint Louis University Law Review’s 2013 Symposium on Teaching Employment & Labor Law, explores the use of the problem method in employment law instruction. Drawing on my experience teaching the basic employment law course, I suggest that those areas of the field that require transactional lawyering skills are perhaps best taught contextually through a hypothetical problem, rather than through cases. Adopting the problem method in such circumstances not only gives students a richer understanding of the law and how it operates, but also the opportunity to cultivate problem-solving skills and professional judgment, thereby advancing the …

Work, Family, And Discrimination At The Bottom Of The Ladder, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

With limited financial resources, few social supports, and high family caregiving demands, low-wage workers go off to work each day to jobs that offer low pay, few days off, and little flexibility or schedule stability. It should come as no surprise, then, that workers' family lives conflict with their jobs. What is surprising is the response at work when they do. This Article provides a survey of lawsuits brought by low-wage workers against their employers when they were unfairly penalized at work because of their caregiving responsibilities at home. The Article reflects a review of cases brought by low-wage hourly …

The Law Of Gender Stereotyping And The Work-Family Conflicts Of Men, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article looks back to the early equal protection jurisprudence of the 1970s and Ruth Bader Ginsburg's litigation strategy of using men as plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases to cast a renewed focus on antidiscrimination law as a means to redress the work-family conflicts of men. From the beginning of her litigation strategy as the head of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, Ginsburg defined sex discrimination as the detrimental effects of gender stereotypes that constrained both men and women from living their lives as they wished-not solely the minority status of women. The same sex-based stereotypes that kept women out …

Discrimination Against Mothers Is The Strongest Form Of Workplace Gender Discrimination: Lessons From Us Caregiver Discrimination Law, Stephanie Bornstein, Joan C. Williams, Genevieve R. Painter

UF Law Faculty Publications

Work-family reconciliation is an integral part of labor law as the result of two major demographic changes: the rise of the two-earner family, and the pressing concern of elder care as Baby Boomers age. Despite these changes, most European and American workplaces still assume that the committed worker has a family life secured so that family responsibilities do not distract from work obligations. This way of organizing employment around a breadwinner husband and a caregiver housewife, which arose in the late eighteenth century, is severely outdated today. The result is workplace-workforce mismatch: Many employers still have workplaces perfectly designed for …

Global Laws, Local Lives: Impact Of The New Regionalism On Human Rights Compliance, Stephen J. Powell, Patricia Camino Pérez

UF Law Faculty Publications

Continuation of the brisk pace of international economic growth with its necessarily increased use of natural resources—often at unsustainable levels—and its higher levels of pollution—often at the cost of citizen health—combine with the rules of the global trading system to threaten human rights to health, to freedom from forced or child labor, to non-discrimination, to a fair wage, to a healthy environment, even to democratic governance and participation in the political process. As a result, in recent years a growing number of economists begrudgingly acknowledge the incontrovertible—although presently dysfunctional—linkage between trade and human rights and the need to integrate these …

Justice, Employment, And The Psychological Contract, Larry A. Dimatteo, Robert C. Bird, Jason A. Colquitt

UF Law Faculty Publications

The paper is a multidisciplinary collaboration between contract law, employment law and management scholars and draws from the fields of law, management, and psychology. After reviewing and noting the gaps in the employment and justice literatures, this paper presents the findings of a survey of 763 participants to measure whether certain variables—procedural and substantive fairness, as well as educating employees on the principle of employment at will—impact the propensities of employees to retaliate and litigate at the time of discharge.

The survey results are significant and striking. We find statistically significant reductions in retaliation and litigation rates when survey respondents …

Author Meets Reader, Scholar Meets Worker: An Introduction To The Section On Labor Relations And Employment Law 2011 Aals Panel Presentation, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article introduces the AALS Section on Labor Relations & Employment’s January 2011 Program, 'Author Meets Reader: Jack Getman’s Restoring the Power of Unions,' while exploring the significance of the contemporaneous union boycott of the Union Square Hilton, the primary site of the AALS 2011 Meeting. When the national leadership of the AALS proved unresponsive to UNITE HERE’s entreaties, a group of interested law professors undertook to convince the organization to relocate its conference using a combination of direct appeals to AALS leadership and grassroots mobilization of faculty attendees. Like many of the union movements described in Jack Getman’s monograph …

Working Relationships, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this Essay written for the symposium on "For Love or Money? Defining Relationships in Law and Life," I extend my previous consideration of friendship to the specific context of the workplace, analyzing friendship through the lens of the ties that arise at work instead of those assumed to arise within the home. Many adults spend half or more of their waking hours at work, in the process forming relationships with supervisors, co-workers, subordinates, customers, and other third parties. Although such relationships are at times primarily transactional, at other times they take on intimate qualities similar to those of family …

(Re)Constructing The Framework Of Work/Family, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

When we talk about the connections between work, family, and marriage, what are our assumptions or our implicit model? In this essay, I hope to expose the importance of questioning the framework within which we operate. Marriage continues to be a core focus of the typical family law course. As a matter of public policy, supporting and valuing marriage, and concern about the conflict between work and family because of the strains it imposes on marriage, makes balancing work and family within a marital framework a focus of law and policy.

In this essay, I argue that we need to …

Response To Working Group On Chapter 2 Of The Proposed Restatement Of Employment Law: Putting The Restatement In Its Place, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

Like most of the contributors to this symposium, I come to bury the Restatement, not to praise it. A fair reading of the ALI’s proposed Chapter 2, on termination and employment at will, reveals a document deeply, if not irretrievably, flawed in both its conception and execution. Principal among my complaints is that the draft neither presents an integrated approach to contractual terms of employment, nor takes a position on the appropriateness of contract as a vehicle for creating employment terms. Thus, in the most benign terms, the draft repackages the common law, adding nothing of value in the process.

Incenting Flexibility: The Relationship Between Public Law And Voluntary Action In Enhancing Work/Life Balance, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

Prepared for the University of Connecticut Law Review's Conference, “Implications of the Four-Day Workweek,” this Paper examines the significance of a four-day, forty-forty work week to caregivers in need of individualized workplace accommodation. Employer interest in “four/forty” and other alternative work structures demonstrates that the current organization of market work is not inevitable and that its re-organization in ways that facilitate full participation by caregivers can sometimes be mutually beneficial. Yet it is unlikely that employers act optimally in responding to individual accommodation requests. Well-known limits on rational choice theory can impede supervisors’ ability to determine whether a particular accommodation …

Just Notice: Re-Reforming Employment At-Will, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article proposes a fundamental shift in the movement to reform employment termination law. For forty years, there has been a near consensus among employee advocates and worklaw scholars that the current doctrine of employment at will should be abandoned in favor of a rule requiring just cause for termination. This Article contends that such calls are misguided, not (as defenders of the current regime have argued) because it grants workers too much protection vis-à-vis management, but because it grants them too little. A just cause rule provides only a weak cause of action to a narrow subset of workers …

Employment As Transaction, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This piece offers a fresh perspective on the upper-level employment law class based on the theme of employment as transaction. Like much of law school, employment law is often taught from a public advocacy perspective in which the primary role of the lawyer is to vindicate workers' rights or responsively defend managerial action. As a doctrinal matter, however, courts are showing increased attention to the role of private ordering in defining workplace rights and assessing liability, even in regulatory areas. Courts routinely examine employers' efforts to redress unlawful behavior under antidiscrimination law and consistently sanction the use of arbitration agreements …

The Evolution Of “Fred”: Family Responsibilities Discrimination And Developments In The Law Of Stereotyping And Implicit Bias, Joan C. Williams, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article integrates a discussion of current family responsibilities discrimination ("FRD") case law with a discussion of the single most important recent development in the field: the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ("EEOC") 2007 issuance of Enforcement Guidance on caregiver discrimination. The Guidance concretely informs the public about what constitutes unlawful discrimination against caregivers under Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Specifically, the Guidance crystallizes two key holdings from case law in regard to Title VII disparate treatment claims brought by caregivers: (1) where plaintiffs have evidence of gender stereotyping, they can make out a prima facie case …