Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Aging On Air: Sex, Age, And Television News, Rebecca H. White

Scholarly Works

The best piece of advice I received when I began teaching law was to adopt Charlie Sullivan's and Mike Zimmer's casebook for my Employment Discrimination class. Before I became a law professor, I had no clue how important choosing the right textbook is, not only for the students but for the teacher. I also was unaware of how much I had to learn about a subject I thought I knew well. I had been litigating employment discrimination cases for several years, but when I began teaching, I quickly learned how much I did not know. Charlie's and Mike's casebook, through …

Nevada Department Of Human Resources V. Hibbs: Universalism And Reproductive Justice, Samuel Bagenstos

Book Chapters

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was the first bill signed into law by President Bill Clinton—just two weeks after he took office. Enactment of the statute was a longstanding goal of the Democratic Party. It also represented a legislative victory for what I will call feminist universalism—the notion that sex equality is best served by rules and policies that reject differentiation between women and men. Ten years after Congress enacted the FMLA, the Supreme Court upheld the statute against a constitutional challenge in Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs. The Hibbs Court, in a surprising opinion by …

Amicus Curiae Brief Of Equality Ohio In Support Of Intervenor Urging Reversal, Doron M. Kalir, Kenneth J. Kowalski

Law Faculty Briefs and Court Documents

Title VII’s plain language bars discharge of “any individual”—whether transgender or not—“because of such individual’s . . . sex.” It applies whenever employers take gender into account in making employment decisions. It is undisputed that the employer in this case based his decision to terminate Ms. Stephens solely on sex-based considerations. To be sure, he could have terminated Ms. Stephens for a wide array of reasons—tardiness, failure to perform, disciplinary issues—or for no reason at all. Under those circumstances, such termination—even of a transgender person—would not be “because of such individual’s sex.” But that is not the case here. Here, …

Comparing The Effects Of Judges' Gender And Arbitrators' Gender In Sex Discrimination Cases And Why It Matters, Pat K. Chew

Articles

Empirical research substantiates that the judges’ gender makes a difference in sex discrimination and sexual harassment court cases. The author’s study of arbitration of sex discrimination cases administered by the American Arbitration Association between 2010 and 2014, however, finds that this judges’ “gender effect” does not occur. Namely, there is no significant difference in the decision-making patterns of female and male arbitrators as indicated by case outcomes.

The author proposes that characteristics of arbitrators, the arbitration process, and arbitration cases all combine to help explain the gender effect differences. Further, she suggests that this analysis reveals concerns about the arbitration …

Inequality, Discrimination And Sexual Violence In Us Collegiate Sports, Erin E. Buzuvis, Kristine Newhall

Faculty Scholarship

While college athletics attract thousands of participants and millions of fans each year, examination of United States college athletics reveals a pattern of inequality, discrimination and abuse, which operates to foreclose women's access and suppress women's interest in athletic participation and leadership. This Chapter examines three gender related issues of integrity in college athletics: gender discrimination in athletic participation and opportunity; barriers to leadership for women coaches and administrators; and the relationship between athletics and sexual violence at college and universities. The Chapter also identifies a number of remedies that can mitigate these problems involving the Department of Education, Congress, …

Athletic Compensation For Women Too? Title Ix Implications Of Northwestern And O'Bannon, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

The NCAA has been relying on Title IX requirements to defend its polices prohibiting compensation for college athletics; it argues that paying athletes in revenue sports, coupled with the commensurate obligation under Title IX to pay female athletes, would be prohibitively expensive.

As a response to the NCAA’s argument, the Author seeks to advance two positions: first, that Title IX would, as argued by the NCAA, require payment of female athletes using some measure of equality; and second, that it is not Title IX that renders the prospect of athlete compensation cost prohibitive, but rather, the fact that college athletics …

Theorizing Billable Hours, Theresa M. Beiner

Faculty Scholarship

This article looks at the ethical and diversity implications of high billable hour requirements. While corporate counsel have increasingly demanded a diverse legal workforce and emphasized the need to lower the costs of outside counsel, law firms have not responded to these concerns in a manner that is producing results. Instead, women continue to drop out of law firm practice at higher rates than their male counterparts and the costs of legal services remain high. High billable hour requirements exacerbate both these problems and have implications as well for ethical lawyering. Using data from a variety of disciplines, the article …

The Law Of Gender Stereotyping And The Work-Family Conflicts Of Men, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article looks back to the early equal protection jurisprudence of the 1970s and Ruth Bader Ginsburg's litigation strategy of using men as plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases to cast a renewed focus on antidiscrimination law as a means to redress the work-family conflicts of men. From the beginning of her litigation strategy as the head of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, Ginsburg defined sex discrimination as the detrimental effects of gender stereotypes that constrained both men and women from living their lives as they wished-not solely the minority status of women. The same sex-based stereotypes that kept women out …

A Matter Of Context: Social Framework Evidence In Employment Discrimination Class Actions, Melissa Hart, Paul M. Secunda

Publications

In litigation disputes over the certification of employment discrimination class actions, social scientists have come to play a central, yet controversial, role. Organizational behavioralists and social psychologists regularly testify for the plaintiffs, offering what is commonly referred to as social framework testimony. These experts explain the general social science research on the operation of stereotyping and bias in decision making and examine the challenged workplace to identify those policies and practices that research has shown will tend to increase and those that will tend to limit the likely impact of these factors. Defendants fight hard against the admission of social …

Masculinities At Work, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This article focuses on the study of masculinities, a body of theoretical and empirical work by sociologists, feminist theorists and organization management theorists. This work, much of which employment law scholars have ignored, studies the role of masculinities, which are often invisible, in creating structural barriers to the advancement of many women and some men at work. Masculinities comprise both a structure that reinforces the superiority of men over women and a series of practices, associated with masculine behavior, performed by men or women, that aid men to maintain their superior position over women. In their less visible form, masculinities …

From Office Ladies To Women Warriors?: The Effect Of The Eeol On Japanese Women, Jennifer S. Fan

Articles

In this Article, Jennifer Fan argues that existing laws in Japan do not adequately protect working women from sex discrimination. Specifically, Fan examines the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), a law designed to prevent discrimination against women in the workplace, and concludes that the EEOL is little more than a paper tiger that preserves the status quo. After briefly discussing the legal sources of protection for working women in Japan before the passage of the EEOL, Fan examines the creation of the EEOL, its substantive provisions, and its legal impact. Through her analysis of recent sexual harassment cases in light …

Gender Sex Agency And Discrimination: A Reply To Professor Abrams, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sexual harassment is the fastest-growing area of employment discrimination. In fact, the annual number of sexual harassment complaints filed with the EEOC has more than doubled in the last six years. No one, or at least no one who has given this problem her serious attention, can deny that workplace sexual harassment is a grave problem and that it significantly impedes women's entrance into many sectors of the wage labor market.

Notwithstanding these impressive numbers, sexual harassment legal doctrine remains remarkably undertheorized – particularly by the Supreme Court. For these and other reasons, …

Applying Restitution To Remedy A Discriminatory Denial Of Partnership, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article suggests that a plaintiff can bring a state cause of action in restitution, liability in unjust enrichment, as an alternative to a federal cause of action in Title VII if the plaintiff was discriminatorily denied partnership by a firm that paid her a salary, but billed her time by the hour to clients. If the firm earned more than it paid in salary and overhead to the plaintiff, that amount would be defendant’s gain, one of the elements of an action in restitution, and the amount to be disgorged should plaintiff prove the other two elements, that the …

Norris V. Arizona Governing Committee: Titile Vii's Applicability To Arizona's Deferred Compensation Plan, Mary E. Berkheiser

Scholarly Works

Analysis of Norris v. Arizona Governing Comm., 671 F.2d 330 (9^th Cir. 1982).

Sex Discrimination In Coaching, R. Lawrence Dessem

Faculty Publications

This article will attempt to provide a legal framework for analysis of this not uncommon payment of lower salaries or stipends to the teacher-coaches (both male and female) of girls' athletics than to the teacher-coaches of comparable or identical boys' sports.