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 …

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 …

Unifying Antidiscrimination Law Through Stereotype Theory, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

Has litigation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reached the limit of its utility in advancing workplace equality? After four decades of forward progress on antidiscrimination law in the courts, Supreme Court decisions in the last decade have signaled a retrenchment, disapproving of key theories scholars and advocates had pursued to address workplace discrimination in its modern, more subtle and structural forms. Yet sex and race inequality at work endure, particularly in pay and at the top of organizations.

Notably, while the Roberts Court majority appears skeptical that discrimination persists and resistant to recognizing the role …

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 …

Law Firms As Defendants: Family Responsibilities Discrimination In Legal Workplaces, Joan C. Williams, Stephanie Bornstein, Diana Reddy, Betsy A. Williams

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article analyzes how the growing trend of litigation alleging employment discrimination based on workers' family caregiving responsibilities applies to law firms and other legal employers. Our research has found at least thirty-three cases since 1990 in which employees of law firms or other legal employers--both attorneys and support staff--have sued their employers for family responsibilities discrimination (“FRD”). FRD is discrimination against employees based on their family caregiving responsibilities for newborns, young children, elderly parents, or ill spouses or partners. Here we analyze these cases, including the employee experiences that have prompted litigation and the legal theories on which the …

Maternity Leave: Taking Sex Differences Into Account, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article focuses on restructuring the workplace in the context of maternity leave. Although most women are no longer, and, indeed, generally cannot be required to take maternity leave, many are not guaranteed leave or may be provided only with inadequate leave. A minority of states have addressed this problem by enacting statutes requiring that all employers provide job-protected maternity leave. Two of the statutes, the California and Montana provisions, have been challenged as discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and the Supreme Court has recently …