Law Commons^™

Leveling The Road From Borg-Warner To First National Maintenance: The Scope Of Mandatory Bargaining, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's most recent effort to distinguish nonmandatory bargaining topics, First National Maintenance Corp. v. NLRB, ¹⁹ illustrates the Court's lack of clarity in this area and vindicates Cox's and Wellington's criticisms of the Court's approach in Borg-Warner. In First National Maintenance (F.N.M.), the Court held that an employer's decision "to shut down part of its business purely for economic reasons" was outside the scope of mandatory bargaining.²⁰ The Court could cite no evidence that Congress intended to prevent employee representatives from obtaining full effective bargaining over such decisions, nor did it articulate any general principle to …

Exercise Of Executive Discretion: A Study Of A Regional Office Of The Department Of Labor, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

Writing for a recent symposium on empirical research in administrative law, Professor Paul Verkuil noted that such research "casts light on one of the dark corners of the law. The vast majority of administrative decisions are of the informal variety, meaning they take place outside the reach of generic administrative procedure acts and frequently outside the courts themselves."' We are only beginning to appreciate how vast is this dark corner and how varied the possible modes of illumination.

This essay casts some additional light into the corner by reporting on a study of the exercise of executive discretion by a …