Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Introduction: The Arc Of Race In Professional And Collegiate Sports Symposium, Kenneth D. Ferguson

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This introduction will highlight the five articles featured in the symposium issue of the UMKC Law Review and will also situate those articles in the Sports Law Symposium titled, The Arc of Race in Professional and Collegiate Sports. The goal of the two-day virtual symposium was to bring together leading legal, social science, and medical science scholars to engage in discourse concerning how race and gender have affected and continue to influence decision making in professional and collegiate sports. The symposium exposed how race, culture, ethnicity, and gender affect a wide range of phenomena in scientific fields such as neuropsychological …

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

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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

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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 …

Uniform Enforcement Or Personalized Law? A Preliminary Examination Of Parking Ticket Appeals In Chicago, Randall K. Johnson

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This article is one in a series of papers that sets the record straight about the type, quality and quantity of information that U.S. cities may employ, in order to make more informed policy decisions. It does so, specifically, by examining information that is collected by the City of Chicago. The goal is to gauge the uniformity, as well as the relative cost-effectiveness, of the parking ticket appeals process. The article has six (VI) parts. Part I is the introduction, which sets the stage for a preliminary examination of the parking ticket appeals process in Chicago. Part II describes the …

The Death Of The Firm, June Carbone, Nancy Levit

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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” …

Medical Malpractice Claims In Mississippi: A Preliminary Analysis, Randall K. Johnson

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This essay explains where medical malpractice claims are filed in Mississippi. It initially does so by collecting state circuit court data, which have been recently released by the Administrative Office of Courts. The essay, then, computes summary statistics. Lastly, it examines these statistics: in order to find out which county had the most medical malpractice claims.

Executive Compensation: In Culture Of Greed And Selfishness, Is There Room For Theory Of "Enough", Robert C. Downs

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No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court’S Regulation Of Civil Procedure: Lessons From Administrative Law, Lumen N. Mulligan, Glen Staszewski

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In this Article, we argue that the Supreme Court should route most Federal Rules of Civil Procedure issues through the notice-and-comment rulemaking process of the Civil Rules Advisory Committee instead of issuing judgments in adjudications, unless the case can be resolved solely through the deployment of traditional tools of statutory construction. While we are not the first to express a preference for rulemaking on civil procedure issues, we advance the position in four significant ways. First, we argue that the Supreme Court in the civil procedure arena is vested with powers analogous to most administrative agencies. Second, building upon this …

Changing Workforce Demographics And The Future Of The Protected Class Approach, Nancy Levit

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The composition and identity characteristics of the American workforce are changing. The population in this country is rising, aging, and becoming much more racially and ethnically diverse. Appearance norms are shifting too. These changes have enormous implications for constitutional and employment discrimination law. In both equal protection and employment discrimination cases, recovery usually depends on membership in a constitutionally or statutorily protected category. Yet the statutory approach to anti-discrimination law has stagnated. Part of the difficulty of the protected class approach is that it is based on something of a paradox — the paradox of exceptionalism. Class-based protection requires individuals …

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

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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 …

Missouri's Public Defender Crisis: Shouldering The Burden Alone, Sean O'Brien

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No abstract provided.

A Step Too Far: Pyett And The Compelled Arbitration Of Statutory Claims Under Union-Controlled Labor Contract Procedures, Mark Berger

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Over time, the Federal Courts have become increasingly supportive of and deferential to arbitration and mandatory arbitration clauses. Because arbitration under Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs) were governed by different but analogous statutes, however, there were always rules carved out for CBA-related arbitration, specifically with regard to claims of discrimination based on statutes external to the CBA. However, as the mandatory arbitration of statutory claims became accepted under non-CBA agreements, the reasoning of this rule was undermined. In 14 Penn Plaza v. Pyett, the Supreme Court abandoned this separation and adopted a rule that CBAs could mandate that statutory claims be …

Megacases, Diversity, And The Elusive Goal Of Workplace Reform, Nancy Levit

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Employment discrimination class action suits are part of a new wave of structural reform litigation. Like their predecessors - the school desegregation cases in the 1950s, the housing and voting inequalities cases in the 1960s, prison conditions suits in the 1970s, and environmental lawsuits since then - these are systemic challenges to major institutions affecting large segments of the public. This article explores the effectiveness of various employment discrimination remedies in reforming workplace cultures, promoting corporate accountability, and implementing real diversity.

Reviewing the architecture and aftermath of consent decrees in five major employment discrimination cases - the cases against Shoney's, …

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Trial, Douglas O. Linder

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It was a warm spring Saturday in New York City, March 25, 1911. On the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building just off of Washington Square, employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory began putting away their work as the 4:45 p.m. quitting time approached. Most of the several hundred Triangle Shirtwaist employees were teenage girls. Most were recent immigrants. Many spoke only a little English. Just then somebody on the eighth floor shouted, Fire! Flames leapt from discarded rags between the first and second rows of cutting tables in the hundred-foot-by-hundred-foot floor. Triangle employee William Bernstein grabbed pails …

Why Bivens Won't Die: The Legacy Of Peoples V. Cca Detention Centers, Lumen N. Mulligan

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Interpreting recent Supreme Court precedent, the Tenth Circuit, in Peoples v. CCA Detention Centers, held that a federal prisoner confined in a privately run prison may not bring a Bivens suit against the employees of the private prison for violations of his constitutional rights when alternative state-law causes of action are available. The author first reviews the Supreme Court's evolving Bivens jurisprudence and turns next to an overview of the Tenth Circuit's opinion. Third, the author argues that, despite the Tenth Circuit's new approach, putative constitutional claims brought under state-law theories of recovery will often be re-federalized, producing uniform federal …

The Imperium Strikes Back: The Need To Teach Socioeconomics To Law Students., William K. Black

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No abstract provided.

The Battle Over Citation Form Brings Notice To Lrw Faculty: Will Power Follow?, Julie M. Cheslik

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No abstract provided.

Rethinking The Legal Oversight Of Benefit Program Exclusions, Mark Berger

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Increasingly, American workers rely upon employers to provide employee benefit programs that include critical health insurance and retirement savings plans. However, employers are finding that providing benefits is a costly undertaking. As a result an increasing number of employers are making use of alternative workforce systems. These involve supplementing a core of full-time workers with contingent employees for whom no commitments are made other than payment for services rendered. Such contingent workers have no expectation of indefinite or continuous employment, and are generally excluded from whatever benefit programs the company may provide.

The increasing use of two-tier employment systems of …

The Contingent Employee Benefits Problem, Mark Berger

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In the contemporary American workplace, benefits are a critical a component of overall compensation. American workers look to their employers for such non-salary items as retirement programs, health insurance, sick pay, and paid vacations. However, the costs of such benefits have been rising rapidly and employers have sought ways to avoid paying them. Increasingly, employers have been using various techniques to create a pool of contingent workers who, even if they work side-by-side with the employer's traditional employees, nevertheless receive none of the benefits made available to members of the regular workforce. These contingent employee arrangements include utilizing contract workers, …

Unjust Dismissal And The Contingent Worker: Restricting Doctrine For The Restructured Employee, Mark Berger

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No abstract provided.

An Introduction To The Symposium, William G. Eckhardt

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Professor William Eckhardt introduces the ideas which initiated planning for and later emanated from UMKC School of Law Symposium “Don't Ask, Don't Tell-Implementation and Litigation.” As the title suggests, the Symposium examined the complex and important issues surrounding the policy of the United States toward gays and lesbians in the Armed Forces. This community­wide event was centered in the UMKC Law School Courtroom on the evening of April 11, 1995.

The idea for this Symposium was conceived by Professor Samuel A. Marcosson, a senior attorney in the Office of General Counsel of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It was …

Can Employment Law Arbitration Work?, Mark Berger

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Over the course of the 1960s through early 1990s, a wave of Federal and State legislation modified the presumption of an at-will employment relationship with a number of statutes that gave workers rights to not be terminated for suspect reasons. However, these protections made conflicts following termination of employment far more likely, and measures were taken to try to lessen the chance of these becoming litigation. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Gilmer v. Interstate/Johnson Lane Corporation, the use of mandatory alternative dispute resolution, primarily arbitration, to resolve employment rights claims began to be considered. This article examines whether …

Judicial Review Of Labor Arbitration Awards: Practices, Policies, And Sanctions, Mark Berger

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No abstract provided.

Capital Punishment In Missouri: Recent Developments In The Interpretation And Administration Of The Death Penalty, Ellen Y. Suni

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No abstract provided.

Preemption Of Section 1983 By Title Vii: An Unwarranted Deprivation Of Remedies, Nancy Levit

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No abstract provided.

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

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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 …

Withdrawal Of Rights And Due Deference: The New Hands Off Policy In Correctional Litigation, Mark Berger

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No abstract provided.

Constitutional Approaches To Metropolitan Planning, John W. Ragsdale Jr

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No abstract provided.