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Facilitating Wage Theft: How Court Use Procedural Rules To Undermine Substantive Rights Of Low-Wage Workers, Nantiya Ruan Jan 2010

Facilitating Wage Theft: How Court Use Procedural Rules To Undermine Substantive Rights Of Low-Wage Workers, Nantiya Ruan

Scholarly Works

In race and sex discrimination class actions, if a defendant employer makes a Rule 68 offer of judgment to the named plaintiffs, courts routinely refuse to dismiss the class claims. In stark contrast, in collective actions for failure to pay lawful wages, if a defendant employer makes a Rule 68 offer of judgment, courts will often dismiss the entire collective action as having been mooted by the named plaintiffs’ recovery. The outcome of such a dichotomy is that low-wage workers are increasingly unable to challenge unlawful wage violations successfully because the aggregation mechanism is too easily defeated. Without an ability …


Setting Foot On Enemy Ground: Cease-And-Desist Letters, Dmca Notifications And Personal Jurisdiction In Declaratory Judgment Actions, Marketa Trimble Jan 2010

Setting Foot On Enemy Ground: Cease-And-Desist Letters, Dmca Notifications And Personal Jurisdiction In Declaratory Judgment Actions, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

In declaratory judgment actions brought by alleged infringers against rights holders, such as actions for declaration of invalidity or non-infringement of intellectual property rights, U.S. courts have long maintained that sending a cease-and-desist letter alone, absent other acts in an alleged infringer's forum, is not a sufficient basis for personal jurisdiction over the rights holder who mailed them to the alleged infringer's forum. Notwithstanding the similarities between cease-and-desist letters and notifications under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals recently decided that sending a notification alone does establish a basis for personal jurisdiction over the …


The Procedural Foundation Of Substantive Law, Thomas O. Main Jan 2010

The Procedural Foundation Of Substantive Law, Thomas O. Main

Scholarly Works

The substance-procedure dichotomy is a popular target of scholarly criticism because procedural law is inherently substantive. This article argues that substantive law is also inherently procedural. I suggest that the construction of substantive law entails assumptions about the procedures that will apply when that substantive law is ultimately enforced. Those procedures are embedded in the substantive law and, if not applied, will lead to over- or under-enforcement of the substantive mandate. Yet the substance-procedure dichotomy encourages us to treat procedural systems as essentially fungible-leading to a problem of mismatches between substantive law and unanticipated procedures. I locate this argument about …