Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Labor and Employment Law
Time’S Up: Against Shortening Statutes Of Limitation By Employment Contract, Meredith R. Miller
Time’S Up: Against Shortening Statutes Of Limitation By Employment Contract, Meredith R. Miller
Scholarly Works
Employers are increasingly adding clauses to contracts with employees that purport to shorten the statutes of limitation for employees to pursue claims against their employers (“SOL Clauses”). SOL Clauses are being imposed on employees in various stages of the contracting process. They have turned up in job applications, offer letters, arbitration clauses, employment agreements and employee handbooks. Where they have been enforced by the courts, the justification has been a prioritization of “freedom of contract” over any other policy concerns. This Article argues that, in the employment context, “freedom of contract” should not be prioritized over other competing concerns, which …
Can Contract Emancipate? Contract Theory And The Law Of Work, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller
Can Contract Emancipate? Contract Theory And The Law Of Work, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller
Faculty Scholarship
Contract and employment law have grown apart. Long ago, each side gave up on the other. In this Article, we re-unite them to the betterment of both. In brief, we demonstrate the emancipatory potential of contract for the law of work.
Today, the dominant contract theories assume a widget transaction between substantively equal parties. If this were an accurate description of what contract is, then contract law would be right to expel workers. Worker protections would indeed be better regulated by – and relegated to – employment and labor law. But contract law is not what contract theorists claim. Neither …
Lowering The Stakes Of The Employment Contract, Aditi Bagchi
Lowering The Stakes Of The Employment Contract, Aditi Bagchi
Faculty Scholarship
Every country has to make hard choices about the distribution of entitlements. But employers control the entitlements that individual Americans enjoy to a far greater extent than those in other rich democracies. In this Essay, I argue that, in the absence of the political consensus necessary to deliver state solutions to political questions, employers here are assigned an exaggerated role in employees’ lives. Government incentives for and directives to employers have become a strategy of political deflection. The effect has been to raise the stakes of employment well beyond the scope of those terms and conditions that relate to attracting …
From Hierarchies To Markets: Fedex Drivers And The Work Contract As Institutional Marker, Julia Tomassetti
From Hierarchies To Markets: Fedex Drivers And The Work Contract As Institutional Marker, Julia Tomassetti
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Judges are often called upon today to determine whether certain workers are “employees” or “independent contractors.” The distinction is important, because only employees have rights under most statutes regulating work, including wage and hour, anti-discrimination, and collective bargaining law. Too often judges exclude workers from statutory protection who resemble what legal scholars have described as typical, industrial employees — long-term, full-time workers with set wages and routinized responsibilities within a large firm. To explain how courts reach these counterintuitive results, the article examines recent federal decisions finding that FedEx delivery drivers are independent contractors rather than employees. It argues that …
Getting Paid In The Naked Economy, Meredith R. Miller
Getting Paid In The Naked Economy, Meredith R. Miller
Scholarly Works
“It’s the end of work as we know it,” reports consulting firm Accenture in a paper about the “rise of the extended workforce.” (Gartside, Silverstone, Farley & Cantrell, Trends Reshaping the Future of HR: The Rise of the Extended Workforce, at 3 (Accenture 2013). The report predicts that, “[i]n the future, organizations’ competitive success will hinge on...workers who aren’t employees at all.” The legal nature of employment is changing and has been changing for quite some time; fewer and fewer workers are “employees.”
It is not new or novel to recognize that, from a legal perspective, there are many benefits …
A Moral Contractual Approach To Labor Law Reform: A Template For Using Ethical Principles To Regulate Behavior Where Law Failed To Do So Effectively, Zev J. Eigen, David S. Sherwyn
A Moral Contractual Approach To Labor Law Reform: A Template For Using Ethical Principles To Regulate Behavior Where Law Failed To Do So Effectively, Zev J. Eigen, David S. Sherwyn
Faculty Working Papers
If laws cease to work as they should or as intended, legislators and scholars propose new laws to replace or amend them. This paper posits an alternative—offering regulated parties the opportunity to contractually bind themselves to behave ethically. The perfect test-case for this proposal is labor law, because (1) labor law has not been amended for decades, (2) proposals to amend it have failed for political reasons, and are focused on union election win rates, and less on the election process itself, (3) it is an area of law already statutorily regulating parties' reciprocal contractual obligations, and (4) moral means …
Show Me The Money The Applicability Of Contract Laws Ratification And Tenderback Doctrines To Title Vii Releases, Daniel P. O'Gorman
Show Me The Money The Applicability Of Contract Laws Ratification And Tenderback Doctrines To Title Vii Releases, Daniel P. O'Gorman
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Fulfilling Lucy's Legacy: Recognizing Implicit Good-Faith Obligations Within Explicit Job Duties, Emily Gold Waldman
Fulfilling Lucy's Legacy: Recognizing Implicit Good-Faith Obligations Within Explicit Job Duties, Emily Gold Waldman
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon is often cited for the principle that every contract contains an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Yet the very source of that decision--the New York Court of Appeals--has been emphatically unwilling to recognize an implied good-faith covenant in the context of employment relationships, given the judicial presumption of employment at will. This essay criticizes the New York Court of Appeals' conclusion that the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing must yield to the presumption of employment at will, and advocates a more balanced approach.
The Doctrine Of Good Faith In Contract Law: A (Nearly) Empty Vessel?, Emily Houh
The Doctrine Of Good Faith In Contract Law: A (Nearly) Empty Vessel?, Emily Houh
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
Empty Vessel explores both the positive and normative questions of what the contractually implied obligation of good faith does and should require of contracting parties. The Article attempts to assess and evaluate the ways in which courts are currently employing the good faith doctrine in contract disputes, as part of a larger project whose goal is to re-conceive and reinvigorate the private law doctrine of good faith as one that might assist in effecting the public law norm of equality. Empty Vessel identifies two dominant theoretical approaches to how to define good faith, which I refer to as the fairness …
Critical Interventions: Toward An Expansive Equality Approach To The Doctrine Of Good Faith In Contract Law, Emily Houh
Critical Interventions: Toward An Expansive Equality Approach To The Doctrine Of Good Faith In Contract Law, Emily Houh
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
This article argues that courts should use the doctrine of good faith in contract law to prohibit improper considerations of race in contract formation and performance, and should recognize good faith as a device for eliminating racial subordination that can function beyond the scope of conventional civil rights discourse. Although civil rights laws provide important remedies to victims of discrimination, the elimination of racial subordination cannot remain the exclusive domain of civil rights law. Rather, other substantive areas of law can and should incorporate expansive equality principles to achieve that end. For example, this article demonstrates how the implied obligation …
Partial Performance Of Employment Contracts, Geoffrey J. Bennett
Partial Performance Of Employment Contracts, Geoffrey J. Bennett
Journal Articles
Commentary on
Wiluszynski v. Tower Hamlets London Borough Council (The Times, 28.4.89)