Law Commons^™

Central Falls Retirees V. Bondholders: Assessing Fear Of Contagion In Chapter 9 Proceedings, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

Modern Chapter 9 litigation has been characterized by extraordinary protections for municipal bondholders, and Central Falls is no exception. Although not well understood by politicians, fear of contagion has encouraged the adoption of legal arrangements that have limited the bankruptcy courts’ ability to include bondholders in the cost of restructuring municipal debt. This preference for bondholders (and, by extension, their insurers) has meant increased misery for taxpayers and retirees. Given that all of these actors appear to have been complicit to some degree in the creation and maintenance of the fiscally imprudent conditions that triggered bankruptcy and that evidence of …

More Hair-Raising Decisions, And How Professor Wendy Greene Combs Through Their Flaws, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

If you are looking for an interesting and timely employment discrimination article to read, please consider Black Women Can’t Have Blonde Hair . . . in the Workplace, by Professor Wendy Greene of Cumberland, Samford University, School of Law. In that article, Professor Greene builds upon the work that she began in her article Title VII: What’s Hair (and Other Race Based Characteristics) Got to Do With It¹ where she argued that characteristics that are commonly associated with a particular racial or ethnic group should fall under Title VII’s current protected categories of race, color, and national origin. …

The Uncertain Impact Of Wal-Mart V. Dukes, Michael Harper

Faculty Scholarship

It has been less than two years since the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, 131 S.Ct. 2541 (2011). During this short period the Court’s opinion has been interpreted by numerous lower courts. It also, not surprisingly, has been the subject of a substantial amount of commentary in law reviews and numerous proposals for legislative reform to restore a promise of class action challenges to employment discrimination that the Dukes decision allegedly shattered. Drawing from this commentary, I would choose these two very different articles as useful guides for tracking the impact of Dukes on employment discrimination class …

Thoughts On The Latest Battles Over Erisa's Remedies, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

It is extraordinarily unlikely that the drafters of ERISA foresaw the effect the statute would have on federal courts and American economic life. It was originally conceived as a "pension bill of rights" designed to ensure that workers received the fixed monthly pension payment (based on tenure and average salary) that they had been promised. It grew, however, into the most litigated statute in the United States Code; to govern increasingly popular individual retirement savings accounts, e.g., 401(k) accounts;4 to be the central statute regulating employment based health insurance, which covers over one hundred and sixty million people; to be …

Zappers & Employment Tax Fraud, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Beyond the grey area of worker misclassifications and general employment tax irregularities there are darker employment relationships where workers are intentionally paid in cash “off-the-books” or “under-the-table.” Grey employment relationships present civil enforcement issues that may become criminal; darker-relationships are criminal from the beginning. Zappers are found on the dark side.

Zappers are fraud-technologies that automatically (and remotely) skim cash from electronic cash registers (ECRs) or back room point of sales (POS) systems. Globally, tax auditors are finding that Zappers frequently provide the cash that is used to compensate “under-the-table” workers. In fact, a Zapper appears to be at the …

Regulation By Amicus: The Department Of Labor's Policy Making In The Courts, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the practice of “regulation by amicus”: that is, an agency’s attempt to mold statutory interpretation and establish policy by filing “friend of the court” briefs in private litigation. Since the United States Supreme Court recognized agency amicus interpretations as a source of controlling law entitled to deference in Auer v. Robbins, agencies have used amicus curiae briefs—in strategic and at times aggressive ways—to advance the political agenda of the President in the courts.

Using the lens of the U.S. Department of Labor’s amicus activity in wage and hour cases, this Article explores the tension between the …

Conflicting Obligations: American Political Culture And The Law Of The Workplace, Reuel E. Schiller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.