Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Binders Full Of Women & Closing The Gap, Michael J. Zimmer

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Same Law, Different Day: The Last Thirty Years Of Wage Litigation And Its Impact On Low-Wage Workers, Nantiya Ruan

Scholarly Works

There can be little doubt that actions to recover lost wages from employers have increased dramatically in the last thirty years. Since the 1970’s, American workers have become subject to a “24/7 marketplace workweek.” Off-the-clock work, misclassification, contingent jobs, and wage theft have become far more prevalent in the last three decades. A few snapshots in time reflect this trend. In 1997, some 1,600 wage suits were filed in federal court. In 2007, just ten years later, the number of wage suits jumped to 7,310. In just one year, 2006-2007, the number of filed wage cases increased by 73 percent. …

What's Left To Remedy Wage Theft? How Arbitration Mandates That Bar Class Actions Impact Low-Wage Workers, Nantiya Ruan

Scholarly Works

For low-wage workers who suffer “wage theft” – employers illegally withholding portions of their wages – the dollars missing from their paychecks violate existing law and significantly impact the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Despite this dire societal problem, the Supreme Court continues “closing the courtroom doors” in two ways: allowing employers to force workers out of court and into private arbitration; and prohibiting aggregate claims. Such trends, in combination, silence wage theft, leaving many claims unheard while unscrupulous employers gain direct advantage.

This Article explains how various procedural rulings have combined to prevent meaningful redress for wage theft. …

"Sexting" And Surveillance: How Smartphones Change Workplace Harassment, Nantiya Ruan

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Masculine Law Firms, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This article describes the masculine culture in law firms and analyzes how this culture harms both men and women because of their gender. Part II explains MMT, and analyzes the masculine practices that exist in modern law firms. Part III studies a lawsuit brought by a law firm associate, a white male father of two who allegedly was fired in retaliation for taking leave under the Family Medical Leave Act and because of his failure to adhere to the macho stereotypes prevalent in the law firm. Part IV analyzes how the law should respond to masculine norms, and suggests that …

Masculinity, Labor, And Sexual Power, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This Essay focuses on gender and sexuality to analyze Hannah Rosin's thesis in the The End of Men. It relies in large part on feminist and masculinities theories to consider how men and women may both suffer gendered disadvantage. It looks specifically at Las Vegas, a market that is sexualized, in order to complicate Rosin's narrative, and to create a better understanding of what is happening in the U.S. workforce. While the Las Vegas market is not representative of markets across the country, it is economically and socially significant and, with the expansion of the casino and gaming industries …

Cognitive Illiberalism, Summary Judgement, And Title Vii: An Examination Of Ricci V. Destefano, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Sins Of Hosanna-Tabor, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court has lost sight of individual religious freedom. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the Court for the first time recognized the ministerial exception, a court-created doctrine that holds that the First Amendment requires the dismissal of many employment discrimination cases against religious employers. The Court ruled unanimously that Cheryl Perich, an elementary school teacher who was fired after she tried to return to school from disability leave, could not pursue an antidiscrimination lawsuit against her employer.

This Article criticizes Hosanna-Tabor as a profound misinterpretation of the First Amendment. The Court mistakenly protected religious institutions' …

The Cost Of Non-Compensable Workplace Harm, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

This essay briefly addresses the limited fashion in which Title VII remedies sex discrimination in the workplace. Those limitations fall into three broad categories. The first encompasses how courts have applied procedural rules to Title VII claims. The second involves Title VII's explicit limitation on its coverage. The third includes substantive limitations that courts have placed on causes of action that are clearly covered by Title VII. This essay addresses those categories in turn.

Cognitive Illiberalism, Summary Judgment, And Title Vii: An Examination Of Ricci V. Destefano, Ann C. Mcginley

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Weathering Wal-Mart, Joseph Seiner

Faculty Publications

In Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2531 (2011), the Supreme Court held that a proposed class of over a million women that had alleged pay and promotion discrimination against the nation’s largest retailer could not be certified. According to the Court, the plaintiffs had failed to establish a common thread in the case sufficient to tie their claims together. The academic response to Wal-Mart was immediate and harsh: the decision will serve as the death knell for mass employment litigation, undermining the workplace protections provided by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII). …

Removing Roadblocks: Certificates Of Good Conduct And Relief From Disabilties, Michael Lorden

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Give And Take: The Chicago Teachers Union Strike And Its Local And National Impact, Margaret Jones

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

While You Were Eating: The Unspoken Human Cost Of Putting Food On Our Tables, Darci Jenkins, Miguel Keberlein Gutierrez

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

A Proposed Overhaul Of The State Department's Summer Work Travel Program To Prevent Labor Violations And Human Trafficking, Margaret O'Donoghue

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

"How Much Are You Worth?" The Effects Of Human Trafficking On The Sex Trade In Illinois And The Remedies Designed To Eliminate It. , Sabena Auyeung

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

50 Years Of (Non) Equal Pay For Equal Work, Katie Rinkus

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Cronyism, Corruption, And Political Intrigue: A New Approach For Old Problems In Public Sector Employment Law, Jonathan Fineman

Journal Publications

This article argues that the best interest of the public is served when at least some public employees receive some degree of job protection. However, there is also value in the argument that we no longer can justify the retention of a uniform system of traditional civil service protections for all public employees. Therefore, this article takes the position that this debate should not be framed as an "either/or" proposition between a rigid system of job protections for all (or most) employees on one hand and unfettered managerial discretion on the other. Instead, job protections should be context-based, varied depending …

From Coolidge To Christie: Historical Antecedents Of Current Government Officials Dealing With Public Sector Labor Unions, Bryan J. Soukup

Law Student Publications

One might ask: what do Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Scott Walker and Chris Christie have in common? The most obvious answer is that they all are (or were) Republican Governors, but these four men have something much deeper in common. All four have faced-off against powerful public sector labor unions and won. This paper will address and examine the similarities between the anti-union actions taken by these men— Coolidge and the Boston Police Strike of 1919, Reagan and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (“PATCO”) Strike of 1981, and Walker and Christie’s recent dealings with public employee unions. In the end, …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

Bad Briefs, Bad Law, Bad Markets: Documenting The Poor Quality Of Plaintiffs' Briefs, Its Impact On The Law, And The Market Failure It Reflects, Scott A. Moss

Publications

For a major field, employment discrimination suffers surprisingly low-quality plaintiffs' lawyering. This Article details a study of several hundred summary judgment briefs, finding as follows: (1) the vast majority of plaintiffs' briefs omit available caselaw rebutting key defense arguments, many falling far below basic professional standards with incoherent writing or no meaningful research; (2) low-quality briefs lose at over double the rate of good briefs; and (3) bad briefs skew caselaw evolution, because even controlling for win-loss rate, bad plaintiffs' briefs far more often yield decisions crediting debatable defenses. These findings are puzzling. In a major legal service market, how …

(In)Competence In Appellate And District Court Brief Writing On Rule 12 And 56 Motions, Scott A. Moss

Publications

No abstract provided.

American Gangsters: Rico, Criminal Syndicates, And Conspiracy Law As Market Control, Benjamin Levin

Publications

In an effort to reexamine legal and political decisions about criminalization and the role of the criminal law in shaping American markets and social institutions, this Article explores the ways in which criminal conspiracy laws in the United States have historically been used to subdue nonstate actors and informal markets that threatened the hegemony of the state and formal market. To this end, the Article focuses primarily on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as illustrative of broader trends in twentieth-century criminal policy. Enacted in 1970, RICO provides criminal sanctions for individuals engaged in unacceptable organized activities and …

The Vulnerable Subject At Work: A New Perspective On The Employment At-Will Debate, Jonathan Fineman

Journal Publications

This article applies recent "vulnerability" scholarship to employment law issues. A vulnerability approach argues that the autonomous liberal legal subject at the heart of much of political and legal thought fails to capture the material, social, and developmental realities of the human condition and thus should be replaced with a "vulnerable subject." Importantly, and in contrast to the autonomous, independent, and self sufficient abstraction of the liberal legal subject, the vulnerable legal subject is theorized as embodied and as embedded in social contexts. The idea of the vulnerable subject has been described as providing a needed intervention into U.S. policy …

Same Law, Different Day: A Survey Of The Last Thirty Years Of Wage Litigation And Its Impact On Low-Wage Workers, Nantiya Ruan

Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal

There can be little doubt that actions to recover lost wages from employers have increased dramatically in the last thirty years. Since the 1970’s, American workers have become subject to a “24/7 marketplace workweek.” Off-the-clock work, misclassification, contingent jobs, and wage theft have become far more prevalent in the last three decades. A few snapshots in time reflect this trend. In 1997, some 1,600 wage suits were filed in federal court. In 2007, just ten years later, the number of wage suits jumped to 7,310. In just one year, 2006-2007, the number of filed wage cases increased by 73 percent. …

Four Signal Moments In Whistleblower Law: 1983-2013, Geoffrey Christopher Rapp

Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal

This contribution to the 30th anniversary symposium of the Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal identifies four signal legal changes in the law governing whistleblowers between 1983 and 2013. Three of these are well known and easily identified -- the amendments to the federal False Claims Act enacted in 1986, the Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower protection scheme enacted in 2002, and the Dodd-Frank securities fraud whistleblower bounty program enacted in 2010. Equally important may prove the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (actually enacted in 2006), which created an unusual carrot for state law whistleblower reward and protection reform. After discussing the impact …

Then And Now: How Technology Has Changed The Workplace, Nancy B. Schess, Esq.

Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Total Recall: The Rise And Fall Of Teacher Tenure, Laura Mcneal

Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Implementing A Long Term Work Visa Program To Document The Undocumented And Protect The U.S. Workforce, Diana M. Cannino

Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Future: They Will Lead; The Law Will Follow, Robert A. Kearney

Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal

No abstract provided.