Law Commons^™

Good Faith Performance In Employment Contracts: A "Comparative Conversation" Between The Us And England, Katherine M. Apps

ExpressO

This paper asks two questions connected by the fact that they both stem from the inherent incompleteness of employment contracts: in American law, how can the terms in employment handbooks be variable, but sometimes only within reasonable procedurally fair circumstances; and in English law, why doesn’t the implied term of mutual trust and confidence in employment contracts fall foul of the strict test for implication of terms into contract? This paper finds the answer to both questions in the doctrine of good faith. An analysis of good faith as a “comparative conversation” between academic and judicial debates in the US …

Seeing Straight In The Workplace: An Examination Of Sexual Orientation Discrimination In Public Employment In The Aftermath Of Lawrence V. Texas, Devin A. Cohen

ExpressO

Title VII does not explicitly protect homosexual employees from sexual orientation discrimination and the courts have generally refused to bootstrap sexual orientation discrimination into Title VII as a form of gender discrimination. Therefore, homosexual employees have had to depend on their constitutional rights to protect them from their public employers’ sexual orientation discrimination. Traditionally, the courts have allowed public employers to discriminate against homosexual employees so long as the employers’ reasons were rationally related to legitimate business purposes.

I argue that the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Lawrence v. Texas forces future courts to question the reasonableness of employers’ rational bases. …

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

No Longer Just Company Men: The Flexible Workforce And Employment Discrimination (Book Review Of Katherine Stone's From Widgets To Digits), Miriam A. Cherry

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

The Duty To Bargain In Good Faith: Nlrb V. Truitt Manufacturing Co. And Nlrb V. Insurance Agents’ International Union, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt

ExpressO

This article discusses two classic Supreme Court cases from the 1950's that explore the contours of the obligation to bargain in good faith: NLRB v. Truitt Manufacturing Co. and NLRB v. Insurance Agents' International Union. In the Truitt case, the Supreme Court held that the obligation to bargain in good faith requires an employer to open its books to the union when the employer refuses a request for a wage increase on the basis that such an increase will drive the employer out of business. In the Insurance Agents' case, the Supreme Court held that union slow-down tactics were consistent …

Where There’S At-Will, There Are Many Ways: Redressing The Increasing Incoherence Of Employment At Will, Scott A. Moss

ExpressO

Employment at will, the doctrine that employees have no legal remedy for unfair terminations because they hold their jobs at the will of the employer, has become mired in incoherence. State courts praise the common law rule as “essential to free enterprise” and “central to the free market,” but in recent years they have riddled the rule with increasing exceptions, allowing employee claims for whistleblowing, fraud, etc. Yet states have neither rejected employment at will nor shown any consistency in recognizing exceptions. Strikingly, states cite the same rationales to adopt and reject opposite exceptions, as a case study of two …

State Legislation As A Fulcrum For Change: Wisconsin's Public Sector Labor Law, And The Revolution In Politics And Worker Rights, Joseph E. Slater

ExpressO

The rise of public sector unions is one of the most significant but least examined movements for legal rights and social change. Through the 1950s, government employees typically had no right to bargain collectively or even to organize unions–rights often regarded as fundamental human rights–and public sector unions were small and relatively powerless. Yet today, unions represent more than 40 percent of all public workers, government employees make up about 40 percent of the entire U.S. labor movement, and public sector unions are among the strongest political advocacy groups in the country. This became possible only through a revolution of …

Organizational Misconduct: Beyond The Principal-Agent Model, Kimberly D. Krawiec

ExpressO

This article demonstrates that, at least since the adoption of the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines in 1991, the United States legal regime has been moving away from a system of strict vicarious liability toward a system of duty-based organizational liability. Under this system, organizational liability for agent misconduct is dependant on whether or not the organization has exercised due care to avoid the harm in question, rather than under traditional agency principles of respondeat superior. Courts and agencies typically evaluate the level of care exercised by the organization by inquiring whether the organization had in place internal compliance structures ostensibly designed …