Law Commons^™

The Inevitable Demise Of The Implied Employment Contract, Jonathan W. Fineman

Jonathan W. Fineman

The Inevitable Demise of the Implied Employment Contract By Jonathan Fineman Abstract This article examines the consequences of the courts’ decision in the early 1980s to apply implied contract doctrine to employment relationships. Although courts did not use the rhetoric of “norms” popular in academic discourse today, their actions were in fact an attempt to enforce workplace norms, specifically the voluntary system of job protection policies employers devised in order to increase worker loyalty and productivity. I explore a question not previously addressed in-depth in the literature: what happened when courts began giving job security practices the force of law? …