Law Commons^™

Lessons From The Fields: Female Farmworkers And The Law, Maria L. Ontiveros

Maine Law Review

In both the fields of labor law and gender studies, we learn the most from experience. The experience of workers coming together to demand equality and respect and the experience of women coming together to share their experiences has led to most of what we study in these fields. Unfortunately, too many times traditional legal doctrine does not fit these experiences. In those cases, we must struggle to change the law to be responsive to the lived experiences of women and workers. This Article explores the lived experiences of one particular group of workers—immigrant farmworking women in California. From their …

The Paradox Of Personality: Mental Illness, Employment Discrimination, And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Deirdre M. Smith

Faculty Publications

Both medicine and the law devote considerable concern to drawing lines, that is, to classifying and making distinctions. In medicine, such line-drawing occurs when a person is designated healthy or ill, normal or disordered. In the law, such line-drawing determines who does and does not bear legal responsibility for a given situation. This Article reviews the demarcation drawn by psychiatry and the courts between disfavored personality and mental illness, a dichotomy not based upon empirical science and therefore, wholly susceptible to social construction and implementation. While society may pathologize noxious personalities, thus making them disabilities, it is loath to extend …

Chapter 5: Unions, Finance, And Labor's Capital, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

Events in recent decades have dramatized the need for labor attention beyond narrow issues of wages and working conditions. In the face of widespread industrial disinvestment, unions have been hard-pressed to protect the job status or employment, or the future of their members. At the same time, the developing labor law has narrowed the range of bargaining opportunities for unions to affect corporate decisions-the very decisions that result in job dislocations and corporate transformations. The effectiveness of strikes has been undermined by growing use of permanent replacement workers.

To thrive in the coming decades, unions must carve out a new …