Law Commons^™

Expungement Of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study, J.J. Prescott, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge in legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws’ effects, in part because the necessary data (such as sealed records themselves) have been unavailable. We were able to obtain access to de-identified data that overcome that problem, and we use it to carry out a comprehensive statewide study of expungement recipients and comparable nonrecipients in Michigan. We offer three key sets of empirical findings. First, among those legally …

Discrimination, The Speech That Enables It, And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Publications

Imagine that you’re interviewing for your dream job, only to be asked by the hiring committee whether you’re pregnant. Or HIV positive. Or Muslim. Does the First Amendment protect your interviewers’ inquiries from government regulation? This Article explores that question.

Antidiscrimination laws forbid employers, housing providers, insurers, lenders, and other gatekeepers from relying on certain characteristics in their decision-making. Many of these laws also regulate those actors’ speech by prohibiting them from inquiring about applicants’ protected class characteristics; these provisions seek to stop illegal discrimination before it occurs by preventing gatekeepers from eliciting information that would enable them to discriminate. …

Gig Workers As Essential Workers: How To Correct The Gig Economy Beyond The Covid-19 Pandemic, Miriam A. Cherry, Ana Santos Rutschman

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, estimates suggest that approximately forty percent of U.S. workers shifted to working remotely from home. But for many gig workers, who performed grocery shopping for Instacart, delivered food and restaurant meals for DoorDash, or who picked up and delivered packages for Shipt, they were working in person and busier than ever. In fact, many of these gig jobs were considered "essential work," and the rules of state lockdowns across the country classified gig workers as "essential workers."

Paid by the task, and managed by algorithms that can automatically deactivate …

Disgorging Harvey Weinstein's Salary, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Harvey Weinstein dramatically altered the way that people view sexual harassment in the workplace. While workplace sexual harassment is far from a new phenomenon – with many perpetrators of such harassment (including Weinstein himself) having gotten away with this misbehavior for decades – the exposure of Weinstein’s misdeeds opened the floodgates, leading countless women from a variety of work environments to share their own experiences with sexual harassment at work. As the #MeToo movement has continued to occupy the headlines, workplace harassment has begun to seem as ubiquitous as it is distressing.

This intensified spotlight on sexual harassment has exposed …

The Politics Of Pregnancy Accommodation, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

How can antidiscrimination law treat men and women “equally” when it comes to the issue of pregnancy? The development of U.S. law on pregnancy accommodation in the workplace tells a story of both legal disagreements about the meaning of “equality” and political disagreements about how best to achieve “equality” at work for women. Federal law has prohibited sex discrimination in the workplace for over five decades. Yet, due to long held gender stereotypes separating work and motherhood, the idea that prohibiting sex discrimination requires a duty to accommodate pregnant workers is a relatively recent phenomenon—and still only partially required by …