Law Commons^™

(A)Woke Workplaces, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

With heightened expectations for a reckoning in response to the broad support for the Black Lives Matter movement after the senseless murder of George Floyd in 2020, employers explored many options to improve racial understanding through discussions with workers. In rejecting any notions of the existence of structural or systemic discrimination, let alone the need to address the consequences of such discrimination, certain groups have begun to oppose BLM by seeking to diminish any social justice actions. One of those key resistance efforts includes labelling in pejorative terms any employers that pursue anti-racism objectives via social justice statements or internal …

Cause For Concern Or Cause For Celebration?: Did Bostock V. Clayton County Establish A New Mixed Motive Theory For Title Vii Cases And Make It Easier For Plaintiffs To Prove Discrimination Claims?, Terrence Cain

Faculty Scholarship

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against an employee “because of” race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. This seems simple enough, but if an employer makes an adverse employment decision partly for an impermissible reason and partly for a permissible reason, i.e., if the employer acts with a mixed motive, has the employer acted “because of” the impermissible reason? According to Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc. and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the answer is no. The Courts in Gross and Nassar held that …

2nd Annual Women In Law Leadership Lecture: A Fireside Chat With Debra Katz, Esq. 03-03-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Bostock, The Crown Acts, And A Possible Right To Self-Expression In The Workplace, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

Employment at-will is the default rule in American law. In the absence of an employment contract, employers are generally free to discharge workers for any reason not barred by statute or public policy. Typically, an employee can be fired when an employer dislikes an employee's self-expression that is not specifically protected by law. However, recent developments in employment discrimination law may provide the foundation for a burgeoning right to self-expression in the workplace. In its recent case Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court ruled sexual orientation discrimination and transgender discrimination necessarily involve sex discrimination under Title VII. The Court's …

Severe Or Pervasive Should Not Mean Impossible And Unattainable: Why The "Severe Or Pervasive" Standard For A Claim Of Sexual Harassment And Discrimination Should Be Replaced With A Less Stringent And More Current Standard, Kristy D'Angelo-Corker

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Covid-19 Employee Health Checks, Remote Work, And Disability Law, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, about 61 million individuals in the U.S. The law’s protections in the workplace are especially important during COVID-19, which has worsened pre-existing disparities experienced by people with disabilities. The ADA also applies to new strategies to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection in the workplace. This Chapter will focus on two strategies that impact individuals with and without disabilities – employee health screening, testing and vaccination policies, and new or expanded remote work programs.

Rwu Law Equity Scorecard February 2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: 'Injustice Dehumanizes Everyone It Touches' 1-31-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The 15th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Keynote Address 1-28-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Andrea Hansen

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Discrimination, The Speech That Enables It, And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Publications

Imagine that you’re interviewing for your dream job, only to be asked by the hiring committee whether you’re pregnant. Or HIV positive. Or Muslim. Does the First Amendment protect your interviewers’ inquiries from government regulation? This Article explores that question.

Antidiscrimination laws forbid employers, housing providers, insurers, lenders, and other gatekeepers from relying on certain characteristics in their decision-making. Many of these laws also regulate those actors’ speech by prohibiting them from inquiring about applicants’ protected class characteristics; these provisions seek to stop illegal discrimination before it occurs by preventing gatekeepers from eliciting information that would enable them to discriminate. …

Disgorging Harvey Weinstein's Salary, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Harvey Weinstein dramatically altered the way that people view sexual harassment in the workplace. While workplace sexual harassment is far from a new phenomenon – with many perpetrators of such harassment (including Weinstein himself) having gotten away with this misbehavior for decades – the exposure of Weinstein’s misdeeds opened the floodgates, leading countless women from a variety of work environments to share their own experiences with sexual harassment at work. As the #MeToo movement has continued to occupy the headlines, workplace harassment has begun to seem as ubiquitous as it is distressing.

This intensified spotlight on sexual harassment has exposed …

Brief Of Brian Wolfman, Aderson B. Francois, And Eric Schnapper As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner In Peterson V. Linear Controls Incorporated, No. 18-1401 (U.S. Supreme Court June 6, 2019), Brian Wolfman, Aderson B. François

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

In Title VII disparate-treatment, employment-discrimination cases, the term “adverse employment action” originally developed as judicial shorthand for the statute’s text, which broadly prohibits any discriminatory conduct by an employer against an employee based on the employee's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. See 42 U.S.C. 2000e-2(a)(1). But what started simply as shorthand has taken on a life of its own and now improperly limits the statute’s reach. The Fifth Circuit’s version of the adverse-employment-action rule stands out as especially improper: Only an “ultimate employment decision”—a refusal to hire, a firing, a demotion, or the like—constitutes impermissible discrimination.

In this …

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 …

Equal Work, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

Most Americans have heard of the gender pay gap and the statistic that, today, women earn on average eighty cents to every dollar men earn. Far less discussed, there is an even greater racial pay gap. Black and Latino men average only seventy-one cents to the dollar of white men. Compounding these gaps is the “polluting” impact of status characteristics on pay: as women and racial minorities enter occupations formerly dominated by white men, the pay for those occupations goes down. Improvement in the gender pay gap has been stalled for nearly two decades; the racial pay gap is actually …

Brief For Catholic Lay Org. As Amici Curiae Supporting Appellant, Fratello V. Roman Catholic Archdiocese, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Reply To Brief In Opposition, Melhorn V. Baltimore Washington Conf. Of United Methodist Church, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Petition For Writ Of Certiorari, Melhorn V. Baltimore Washington Conf. Of United Methodist Church, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

The Local Turn; Innovation And Diffusion In Civil Rights Law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Is the future of civil rights subnational? If one is looking for civil rights innovation, much of this innovation might be happening through legislation, regulatory frameworks, and policies adopted by state and local governments. In recent years, states and cities have adopted legislation banning discrimination in housing based on the source of an individual's income, regulating the consideration of arrest or conviction in employment decisions, and prohibiting discrimination in employment based on an applicant's credit history.

This deployment of subnational power is not new to civil rights. Many of the laws and regulatory frameworks that are now core to the …

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 …

Exploited At The Intersection: A Critical Race Feminist Analysis Of Undocumented Latina Workers And The Role Of The Private Attorney General, Llezlie Green

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Undocumented Latina workers experience wage theft and other workplace exploitation at alarmingly high rates. The stock stories associated with immigrant workers often involve male day laborers or female domestic workers and fail to capture the experiences of women toiling in the farms, restaurants, factories, and home and business cleaning services that employ hundreds of thousands of immigrant women. The resulting invisibility of undocumented Latina women in the typical narratives parallels the paucity of undocumented Latina workers who make legal claims against their exploitative employers. Their distinct experiences are characterized by multiple intersecting vulnerabilities based upon their ethnicity, gender, and immigration …

Centering The Teenage "Siren": Adolescent Workers, Sexual Harassment, And The Legal Construction Of Race And Gender, Anastasia M. Boles

Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship and media attention has focused on the prevalence of sexually harassing behavior directed at working teenagers, and the emergence of sexual harassment lawsuits by these minors against their employers. Although many of the legal issues concerning workplace sexual harassment and adult workers (and the various state and federal jurisprudence prohibiting it) have been widely discussed, there is surprisingly little discourse, research, and precedent addressing the problem of workplace sexual harassment and teen workers.

Currently, most sexual harassment cases brought by adolescent workers are litigated using the doctrinal framework for adult workers. Only the Seventh Circuit has developed an …

Contracts Symposium Issue: Featured Speaker: The Right To Contract As A Civil Right, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The "right to contract," whether originating in the Constitution, common law, or natural law, has been long and widely felt to be in tension with our civil rights, broadly conceived. The individual himself, we generally believe, and only the individual, should decide the scope and terms of his affirmative, voluntary, and other-regarding undertakings. When he does so through contract, the individual and only the individual should determine the terms under which he will perform those duties. The civil rights laws of the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, and the various rights they create interfere with these natural freedoms.

So, …

Brief For Prof. Leslie C. Griffin As Amica Curiae In Support Of Appellant, Kant V. Lexington Theological Seminary, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Identifying (With) Disability: Using Film To Teach Employment Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

Building on a prior article about using film to teach health law, this Essay is intended to share my experience using the film Philadelphia as a method of enhancing coverage and discussion of the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and to provide an opportunity for recognition of, and identification with, the experiences of people with disabilities.

Identifying (With) Disability: Using Film To Teach Employment Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

Building on a prior article about using film to teach health law, this Essay is intended to share my experience using the film Philadelphia as a method of enhancing coverage and discussion of the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and to provide an opportunity for recognition of, and identification with, the experiences of people with disabilities.

Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression has emerged as a major focus of civil rights reform. Opponents of these reforms have structured their opposition around one dominant image: the bathroom. With striking consistency, opponents have invoked anxiety over the bathroom -- who uses bathrooms, what happens in bathrooms, and what traumas one might experience while occupying a bathroom -- as the reason to permit discrimination in the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. This rhetoric of the bathroom in the debate over gender-identity protections seeks to exploit an underlying anxiety that has played a role in …

Title Vii Works - That's Why We Don't Like It, Chuck Henson

Faculty Publications

In response to the universal belief that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not fulfilling its purpose, this Article presents a different perspective on the reality of this federal employment discrimination law. Title VII is fulfilling the purpose of the Congress that created it. The purpose was not the eradication of all discrimination in employment. The purpose was to balance the prohibition of the most obvious forms of discrimination with the preservation of as much employer decision-making latitude as possible. Moreover, the seminal Supreme Court decision, McDonnell Douglas v. Green, accurately implemented this balance. This Article …