Law Commons^™

Workplace Dispute Resolution In Ireland At A Crossroads: Challenges And Opportunities, Brian M. Barry Dr

Articles

The Workplace Relations Act 2015 fundamentally reformed the workplace dispute resolution system in Ireland–the centrepiece being the Workplace Relations Commission, the new body for first-instance dispute resolution. While the overall system is an improvement on its overly-complex and confusing predecessor, the Supreme Court’s decision in Zalewski v An Adjudication Officer declaring aspects of adjudication at the WRC unconstitutional, coupled with user representatives’ persistent concerns about how adjudication is conducted, present ongoing challenges.

This article describes the results of a survey undertaken in 2019 by the author of over one hundred representatives’ views on the system, and contextualises them in light …

Towards Greater Investor Accountability: Indirect Actions, Direct Actions By States And Direct Actions By Individuals, Martin Jarrett, Sergio Puig, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

Investor accountability in international investment law (IIL) has been gaining increasing traction in recent years. Most visibly, some states have included investor obligations in their investment treaties, while others have made them part of their model treaties. While highly significant for the substance of IIL, these duties need adequate procedural tools to enforce them. Otherwise, investor obligations will be only decorative features of investment treaties without any legal meaning. The oft-discussed option of counterclaims is limited insofar as it may only be launched after an investor has made a claim against a state. As a result, it is important to …

A Strategy Model For Workplace Mediation Success, Brian M. Barry Dr

Articles

The article proposes a three-step model to help workplace mediators decide on the optimum strategy for mediating workplace disputes. The model uses a grid – the Workplace Mediation Strategy Grid – which is based on a modified version of a grid Professor Leonard Riskin developed for categorising mediation orientations (Riskin 1994; Riskin 1996). The model asks the mediator to first consider the nature of the workplace dispute based on three facets of the dispute. This guides the mediator to plot a position on the Grid which represents two fundamental aspects of strategy for mediating that dispute: (1) how broadly the …

The Economics Of Class Action Waivers, Albert H. Choi, Kathryn E. Spier

Articles

Many firms require consumers, employees, and suppliers to sign class action waivers as a condition of doing business with the firm, and the U.S. Supreme Court has endorsed companies’ ability to block class actions through mandatory individual arbitration clauses. Are class action waivers serving the interests of society or are they facilitating socially harmful business practices? This paper synthesizes and extends the existing law and economics literature by analyzing the firms’ incentive to impose class action waivers. While in many settings the firms’ incentive to block class actions may be aligned with maximizing social welfare, in many other settings it …

The Vulnerable Sovereign, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The connection between sovereignty and law is fundamental for both domestic (internal sovereignty) and the international (external sovereignty) purposes. As the dominant forms of government have evolved over time, so has the way in which we think about sovereignty. Consideration of the historical evolution of the concept of sovereignty offers insight into how we think of sovereignty today. A term that was born to represent the relationship between the governor and the governed has become a term that is used to represent the relationships between and among states in the global legal order. This article traces the history of the …

A Hague Convention On Parallel Proceedings, Paul Herrup, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The Hague Conference on Private International Law has engaged in a series of projects that, if successful, could provide the framework for critical aspects of trans-national litigation in the Twenty-first Century. Thus far, the work has resulted in the 2005 Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements and the 2019 Hague Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters. Work now has begun to examine the need, desirability and feasibility of additional instruments in the area, with discussions of an instrument that would either require or prohibit the exercise of jurisdiction by national courts, and …

Hiding Sexual Harassment: Myths And Realities, Pat K. Chew

Articles

Hiding Sexual Harassment: Myths and Realities

Nevada Law Journal, Vol. 21, p. 1223, 2021

Sexual harassment and gender disparities in the workplace continue, but we are not paying enough attention. The heralded me-too movement and the publicized downfalls of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and other former luminaries might give the impression that the lid is blown off the indignities of harassment in the workplace and that American society’s collective disdain and abhorrence of harassment has quickly put an end to these incivilities. But these headline cases are just the tip of the sexual harassment iceberg; they may even give us …

The Hague Judgments Convention In The United States: A “Game Changer” Or A New Path To The Old Game?, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The Hague Judgments Convention, completed on July 2, 2019, is built on a list of “jurisdictional filters” in Article 5(1), and grounds for non-recognition in Article 7. If one of the thirteen jurisdictional tests in Article 5(1) is satisfied, the judgment may circulate under the Convention, subject to the grounds for non-recognition found in Article 7. This approach to Convention structure is especially significant for countries considering ratification and implementation. A different structure was suggested in the initial Working Group stage of the Convention’s preparation which would have avoided the complexity of multiple rules of indirect jurisdiction, each of which …

Beyond Plea Bargaining: A Theory Of Criminal Settlement, Richard Lorren Jolly, J.J. Prescott

Articles

Settlement is a term rarely used in criminal law. Instead, people speak almost exclusively of plea bargaining—i.e., enforceable agreements in which a defendant promises to plead guilty in exchange for a prosecutor’s promise to seek leniency in charging or at sentencing. But a traditional plea agreement is just the most visible instance of a much broader class of possible criminal settlement agreements. In terms of their fundamentals, criminal settlements are indistinguishable from their civil counterparts: through either an atomized or comprehensive bargain, parties exchange what they have for what they want, advancing their respective interests in cost minimization, risk mitigation, …