Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Maternity Leave: Taking Sex Differences Into Account, Nancy E. Dowd

Nancy Dowd

This Article focuses on restructuring the workplace in the context of maternity leave. Although most women are no longer, and, indeed, generally cannot be required to take maternity leave, many are not guaranteed leave or may be provided only with inadequate leave. A minority of states have addressed this problem by enacting statutes requiring that all employers provide job-protected maternity leave. Two of the statutes, the California and Montana provisions, have been challenged as discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and the Supreme Court has recently …

Fashioning A General Common Law For Employment In An Age Of Statutes, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

In the current post-Erie age of statutes the Supreme Court continues to have potential influence over the development of a “general” common law used to decide recurring issues governed by state law. This influence, which has drawn little commentary, derives from the Court’s authority to consider analogous issues when filling gaps in federal statutes, sometimes through express reliance on general common law. The influence is through the power to persuade, like that of the federal judiciary in its general common lawmaking age of Swift, rather than through the power to command, like that of the federal judiciary in the formulation …

The Evolution And Decline Of The Effective-Vindication Doctrine In U.S. Arbitration Law, Okezie Chukwumerije

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

This article offers information on the history, significance and role of the effective-vindication doctrine in U.S. arbitration law in promoting access to justice. It analyzes the significance of broad policy implications regarding the interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) by the Court facilitating the arbitration of commercial disputes and protecting the statutory rights of consumers in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Green Tree Financial Corp. v. Randolph.

Employment Arbitration At The Crossroads: An Assessment And Call For Action, Stephen L. Hayford, Jamie Darin Prenkert, Anjanette H. Raymond

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Arbitration agreements must be on equal footing with all types of contracts. This stark reality demands that the various stakeholders in the arbitration community converge in the interest of designing and institutionalizing arbitration mechanics and processes that, as a start, exceed the minimum requirements to avoid arguments of substantive unconscionability and, more broadly, provide the fair, just, and accountable alternative dispute resolution system the FAA and the U.S. Supreme Court have indicated it can be. This paper seeks to guide this next stage of the debate by first reviewing the doctrinal developments over the past thirty years that led to …

The Tort Label, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Courts and commentators often label federal discrimination statutes as torts. Since the late 1980s, the courts increasingly applied tort concepts to these statutes. This Article discusses how courts placed employment discrimination law within the organizational umbrella of tort law without examining whether the two areas share enough theoretical and doctrinal affinities.

While discrimination statutes are torts in some general sense that they do not arise out of criminal law and are not solely contractual, it is far from clear that these statutes are enough like traditional torts to justify the reflexive and automatic use of tort law. Employment discrimination statutes …

A Reasonable Belief: In Support Of Lgbt Plaintiffs' Title Vii Retaliation Claims, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

When an LGBT employee is punished for complaining about discrimination in the workplace, he or she has two potential causes of action under Title VII: first, a challenge to the underlying discrimination, and second, a challenge to the resulting retaliation. The first claim is vulnerable to dismissal under courts’ narrow interpretation of Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination “because of sex” as applied to LGBT plaintiffs. But such an outcome need not determine the fate of the second claim. Faithful application of retaliation law’s “reasonable belief” standard, which protects a plaintiff from reprisal so long as she reasonably believed that she …

Clothes Don't Make The Man (Or Woman), But Gender Identity Might, Jennifer Levi

Faculty Scholarship

The Ninth Circuit's recent decision in Jespersen v. Harrah's Operating Co., Inc. reflects the blinders on many contemporary courts regarding the impact of sex-differentiated dress requirements on female employees. Although some courts have acknowledged the impermissibility of imposing sexually exploitive dress requirements, they have done so only at the extreme outer limits, ignoring the concrete harms experienced by women (and men) who are forced to conform to externally imposed gender norms. On the other hand, some transgender litigants have recently succeeded in challenging sex-differentiated dress requirements. This success is due in part to their incorporation of disability claims based on …

Amicus Brief (Certiorari Stage) -- Kalyanaram V. New York Institute Of Technology, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Whistleblowers should not be required to pick their poison. They should not be penalized for following the law, particularly where, as here, the alleged “wrong” relied upon by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals was Petitioner’s compliance with the Act’s sealing provision. See 31 U.S.C. § 3730(b)(2) That provision expressly requires whistleblowers to maintain the confidentiality of qui tam lawsuits during the pendency of a government investigation. Petitioner followed the Act’s express mandate—and suffered the consequences.

Let's Pretend Discrimination Is A Tort, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In the past decade, the Supreme Court has repeatedly invoked tort common law to interpret federal discrimination statutes. During this same time period, the Supreme Court increasingly invoked textualism as the appropriate methodology for interpreting these statutes. One immediate effect of these two trends - tortification and textualism - is to restrict discrimination law by tightening causal standards.

This Article explores how interpreting discrimination statutes through the lenses of tort law and textualism can expand, rather than restrict, discrimination law. It assumes that courts will continue to characterize discrimination statutes as torts and as deriving from the common law, despite …

Torts And Civil Rights Law: Migration And Conflict: Symposium Introduction, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Curiously, the connection between civil rights and civil wrongs has not been a topic that has captivated the attention of large numbers of legal scholars over the years. The distance that has developed between the two fields likely reflects their placement on opposite sides of the public-private divide, with Title VII and other anti-discrimination statutes forming part of public law, while torts is a classic, private law subject. To compound the division, both subjects are to some extent still under-theorized. Employment discrimination scholarship is often caught up in the process of analyzing the doctrinal implications of the latest Supreme Court …

Procedural Predictability And The Employer As Litigator: The Supreme Court’S 2012-2013 Term, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In this contribution to the University of Louisville Law Review’s Annual Carl A. Warns Labor and Employment Institute issue, I examine the Supreme Court’s labor and employment-related decisions from the October Term 2012 (OT 2012). I argue that the Court’s decisions assisted employers as litigators—as repeat players in the employment dispute resolution system—in two ways. First, the Court established simple contract drafting strategies that employers may use to limit their exposure to employment claims. Second, the Court adopted bright-line interpretations of employment statutes. Both forms of assistance served a formalist interest in what I term “procedural predictability”—enhanced employer predictability and …

Disabling The Gender Pay Gap: Lessons From The Social Model Of Disability, Michelle Travis

Michelle A. Travis

As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Title VII’s prohibition against sex-based compensation discrimination in the workplace, the gender wage gap remains robust and progress toward gender pay equity has stalled. This article reveals the role that causal narratives play in undermining the law’s potential for reducing the gender pay gap. The most recent causal narrative is illustrated by the “women don’t ask” and “lean in” storylines, which reveal our society’s entrenched view that women themselves are responsible for their own pay inequality. This causal narrative has also embedded itself in subtle but pernicious ways in antidiscrimination doctrine, which helps …