Law Commons^™

Age Diversity, Alexander Boni-Saenz

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This Article is the first to examine age diversity in the legal literature, mapping out its descriptive, normative, and legal dimensions. Age diversity is a plural concept, as heterogeneity of age can take many forms in various human institutions. Likewise, the normative rationales for these assorted age diversities are rooted in distinct theoretical foundations, making the case for or against age diversity contextual rather than universal. A host of legal rules play a significant role in regulating age diversity, influencing the presence of different generations in the workplace, judiciary, and Congress. Better understanding the nature and consequences of age diversity …

Covid-19 Employee Health Checks, Remote Work, And Disability Law, Elizabeth Pendo

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The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, about 61 million individuals in the U.S. The law’s protections in the workplace are especially important during COVID-19, which has worsened pre-existing disparities experienced by people with disabilities. The ADA also applies to new strategies to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection in the workplace. This Chapter will focus on two strategies that impact individuals with and without disabilities – employee health screening, testing and vaccination policies, and new or expanded remote work programs.

Competition Policy For Labour Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Competition law in many jurisdictions defines its consumer welfare goal in terms of low consumer prices. For example, mergers are challenged when they threaten to cause a price increase from reduced competition in the post-merger market. While the consumer welfare principle is under attack in some circles, it remains the most widely expressed goal of antitrust policy.

We would do better, however, to define consumer welfare in terms of output rather than price. Competition policy should strive to facilitate the highest output in any market that is consistent with sustainable competition. That goal is in most ways the same as …

Hidden From View: Disability, Segregation And Work, Elizabeth Pendo

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The employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 were intended to bring working-age people with disabilities into the workplace by providing options for them to seek and gain meaningful, integrated employment. Although the ADA has made significant gains, the rate of progress in employment has been disappointing. While the lack of progress of people with disabilities in the traditional workplace has received attention, the work done by many, especially those with severe disabilities in segregated workplaces, remains hidden in sheltered workshops. This chapter explores the intersection of the concepts of disability, invisibility, and work and identifies the …

Bankruptcy And Economic Recovery, Thomas H. Jackson, David A. Skeel Jr.

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To measure economic growth or recovery, one traditionally looks to metrics such as the unemployment rate and the growth in GDP. And in terms of figuring out institutional policies that will stimulate economic growth, the focus most often is on policies that encourage investment, entrepreneurial enterprises, and reward risk-taking with appropriate returns. Bankruptcy academics that we are, we tend to add our own area of expertise to this stable— with the firm belief that thinking critically about bankruptcy policy is an important element of any set of institutions designed to speed economic recovery. In this paper, written for a book …

Identifying (With) Disability: Using Film To Teach Employment Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

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Building on a prior article about using film to teach health law, this Essay is intended to share my experience using the film Philadelphia as a method of enhancing coverage and discussion of the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and to provide an opportunity for recognition of, and identification with, the experiences of people with disabilities.

Participation As A Theory Of Employment, Matthew T. Bodie

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The concept of employment is an important legal category, not only for labor and employment law, but also for intellectual property law, torts, criminal law, and tax. The right-to-control test has dominated the debate over the definition of “employee” since its origins in the master-servant doctrine. However, the test no longer represents our modern notion of what it means to be an employee. This change has played itself out in research on the theory of the firm, which has shifted from a model of control to a model of participation in a team production process. This Article uses the theory …

Identifying (With) Disability: Using Film To Teach Employment Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

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Building on a prior article about using film to teach health law, this Essay is intended to share my experience using the film Philadelphia as a method of enhancing coverage and discussion of the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and to provide an opportunity for recognition of, and identification with, the experiences of people with disabilities.

Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff

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Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression has emerged as a major focus of civil rights reform. Opponents of these reforms have structured their opposition around one dominant image: the bathroom. With striking consistency, opponents have invoked anxiety over the bathroom -- who uses bathrooms, what happens in bathrooms, and what traumas one might experience while occupying a bathroom -- as the reason to permit discrimination in the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. This rhetoric of the bathroom in the debate over gender-identity protections seeks to exploit an underlying anxiety that has played a role in …

Race, Sex And Genes At Work: Uncovering The Lessons Of Norman-Bloodsaw, Elizabeth Pendo

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The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (“GINA”) is the first federal, uniform protection against the use of genetic information in both the workplace and health insurance. Signed into law on May 21, 2008, GINA prohibits an employer or health insurer from acquiring or using an individual’s genetic information, with some exceptions. One of the goals of GINA is to eradicate actual, or perceived, discrimination based on genetic information in the workplace and in health insurance. Although the threat of genetic discrimination is often discussed in universal terms - as something that could happen to any of us - the …

Back To Color Blindness: Recent Developments In Race Discrimination Law In The United States, Marcia L. Mccormick

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The United States has a long and somewhat conflicted history of espousing egalitarian values and yet tolerating a certain level of subordination of particular groups to a greater or lesser extent at the same time. Like many countries, it struggles with reconciling the goals of equality, pluralism, and liberty, and the balance has been struck differently at different times. In the current wave of such efforts, the Supreme Court is marking an increasingly formalist approach to the question of discrimination, while Congress appears to be pushing a slightly more substantive approach to discrimination. This short paper analyzes the Court’s recent …

The Disabled Lawyers Have Arrived; Have They Been Welcomed With Open Arms Into The Profession? An Empirical Study Of The Disabled Lawyer, Donald H. Stone

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This Article proceeds in seven parts. Part I briefly outlines the ADA's position on reasonable accommodations. Part II addresses how law firms are reacting and responding to the fact that they employ lawyers with mood disorders, such as depression or bipolar disorder, attorneys with learning disabilities, and individuals with alcohol or drug addiction. What disabilities are most often represented? Are lawyers with disabilities apt to receive work modifications to accommodate their disability? Are attorneys with mental illness provided with less stressful case assignments? Are lawyers with substance use disorders and alcohol or drug addiction assigned co-counsel to monitor or offer …

The Problem With Unpaid Work, Katharine K. Baker

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This article examines the problems with a social norm that assumes women should shoulder a disproportionate amount of unpaid family work. It evaluates the most recent empirical data which suggests that women continue to do substantially more unpaid work than men, and men continue to do substantially more paid work than women. It then briefly reviews two standard explanations for where this gendered division of work may come from, biological inclination and/or systems of male dominance. It suggests that neither of these traditional explanations have given adequate consideration to the normative question begged by the extant division of labor. Is …

The Business Of Employing People With Disabilities: Four Case Studies, Alexander A. Boni-Saenz, Allen W. Heinemann, Deborah S. Crown, Linda L. Emanuel

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This exploratory study examines employer attitudes towards people with disabilities in the labor market. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with senior management, human resources staff, directors of diversity, and hiring managers at four corporations, it pinpoints reasons why businesses chose to hire people with disabilities, investigates the perceived benefits and barriers to hiring people with disabilities, and identifies strategies for successfully hiring and retaining workers with disabilities. It fills a gap in examining the attitudes and decision-making processes of U.S. companies that have been leaders in hiring people with disabilities, as well as delving into the special issues of small businesses …

Decentering The Firm: The Limited Liability Company And Low Wage Immigrant Women Workers, Miriam A. Cherry

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Congress is now considering radical changes to the immigration system. This article looks at the immigration issue as a labor and employment law question, and proposes a possible solution based on this approach.

I suggest that forming Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) will benefit low-wage immigrant women workers by transforming them into business owners. By using existing legal structures to their benefit, low-wage women workers can curtail at least a portion of the exploitation that they currently experience. Instead of being hired to perform a job, having the intermediary take a cut, and then pay them some amount out of that, …

The Allure And Danger Of Practicing Law As Taxonomy, Marcia L. Mccormick

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In this article, I hope to contribute to the ongoing debate on how our society treats the problem of discrimination. Many scholars have criticized the types of antidiscrimination statutes we have enacted as well as the ways in which the courts have interpreted those laws. While I agree with many of these critiques, rather than tackle those very large issues at the outset, I focus on the test the courts currently use to evaluate the evidence to determine whether an inference can be made that discrimination has occurred. I argue that lawyers and courts have become so caught up in …

Longitudinal Patterns Of Intimate Partner Violence, Risk, Well-Being, And Employment: Preliminary Findings, Jane C. Murphy, Mary Ann Dutton, Lisa A. Goodman, Dorothy J. Lennig

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Over 7 months (June 1999 to January 2000), researchers recruited 406 women from 1 of 3 sites in a northeastern city at the point they were seeking help for violence against them by a current or former male partner. Intimate partner violence was measured with a modified version of the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale. Some form of serious violence during the previous year was reported by 88 percent of the participants. By the first 3-month follow-up period, nearly one-third of the participants reported the recurrence of some form of physical violence; 20.4 percent reported an injury; and 18.1 percent reported …

Substantially Limited Justice?: The Possibilities And Limits Of A New Rawlsian Analysis Of Disability-Based Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

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In its recent terms, the Supreme Court has increasingly turned its attention toward the Americans with Disabilities Act, and specifically the questions of who should be protected under the ADA, and what such protection requires. In the wake of the Court's decisions, workers have found it increasingly difficult to assert and protect their right to be free of disability-based discrimination in the workplace. Given the widespread influence of John Rawls in contemporary discussions of social, political and economic justice, his recent and final formulation of his theory of distributive justice presents a significant and promising philosophical foundation for evaluation of …

Immigration Restrictions As Employment Discrimination, Howard F. Chang

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In this paper, I analyze restrictions on immigration to the United States as a form of government-mandated employment discrimination against aliens. Through our immigration laws, we deny aliens access to valuable employment opportunities that are open to natives. Under our immigration and nationality laws, we base this discrimination explicitly on circumstances of birth beyond the control of the alien. I argue that immigration restrictions thereby violate our liberal ideals of equality, which require a cosmopolitan perspective that extends equal concern to all individuals. Furthermore, even if we assume a less demanding moral theory that allows us to give the interests …

Two Workers, Kenneth Lasson

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This article profiles two individuals who were workers in two distinct industries. The first profile is of Dotty Neal, who at the time of this article's writing, worked for the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company, in Maryland. The nature of her job and work are described, often in her own words. The second profile is of Ray Murdock, who worked as a sanitary worker, or "garbageman," in Boston, MA. Again, the nature of this kind of work is described, often in Murdock's own words. The article shows how much technology has changed in the telecommunications industry, and perhaps how much …