Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

The Problem With Predators, June Carbone, William K. Black

Faculty Works

Both corporate theory and sex discrimination law start with presumptions that CEOs seek to advance legitimate ends and design the internal organization of business enterprises to achieve such ends. Yet, a growing literature questions why CEOs and boards of directors nonetheless select for Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and toxic masculinity, despite the downsides associated with these traits. Three scholarly literatures—economics, criminology, and gender theory—draw on advances in psychology to shed new light on the construction of seemingly dysfunctional corporate cultures. They start by questioning the assumption that CEOs—even CEOs of seemingly mainstream businesses—necessarily seek to advance “legitimate” ends. Instead, they suggest …

Discrimination By Design?, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

Platform world is speeding the redesign of employment. Bricks-and-mortar firms once hired through narrow portals and then invested in the workers they hired, providing job security and predictable career ladders. Platform world flings the doors wide open to income-generating efforts, providing new opportunities but also offering security and predictable advancement to almost no one.

Other legal scholars have mined these same data for gender disparities; they have found disparities in the platform economy arising from customer biases and individual preferences, and manifested in men’s and women’s different experiences in everything from pricing plumbing services to fraud prevention. Neutral-appearing algorithms may …

The Death Of The Firm, June Carbone, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

This Article maintains that the decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which referred to the corporation as a legal fiction designed to serve the interests of the people behind it, signals the “death of the firm” as a unit of legal analysis in which business entities are treated as more than the sum of their parts and appropriate partners to advance not just commercial, but public ends. The Hobby Lobby reference to the firm as a fiction is a product of a decades-long shift in the treatment of corporations. This shift reflects both an ideological embrace of the free-market-oriented “agency-cost” …

Lawyers Suing Law Firms: The Limits On Attorney Employment Discrimination Claims And The Prospects For Creating Happy Lawyers, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

It is more than a mild irony that anti-discrimination law fails lawyers in particular. This article addresses doctrinal and pragmatic limits on employment discrimination lawsuits by lawyers against their law firms. It considers the failures of the Title VII template to remedy the sorts of discrimination and dissatisfactions lawyers face in the practice of law, and concludes that many of the things that make lawyers unhappy are simply not reachable through employment discrimination lawsuits. The latter portion of the article turns to the recently emerging science of happiness literature. It suggests that the interests of lawyers and their firms may …

The Future Of Comparable Worth Theory, Nancy Levit, Joan Mahoney

Faculty Works

Despite statutes intended to remedy wage disparities between men and women, the average woman working full-time earns only sixty percent as much as her male counterpart. While a portion of the earnings differential is attributable to "pure" or intentional discrimination, approximately eighty-two percent of the difference is due to occupational segregation. As commonly understood, occupational segregation refers to the situation in which women work at jobs that historically have been held by women and that are less remunerative than jobs usually held by men.

Only recently has the distinction between intentional discrimination and discrimination resulting from occupational segregation commanded much …