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Cases and Materials on Employment Law, the Field as Practiced, 5th ed.
No full textCoauthored by two reporters from the recently released Restatement on Employment Law and Professor Tippett from the University of Oregon, this casebook covers topics of critical interest to future practitioners. It introduces the concept of employment-at-will, and contractual and tort-based exceptions. It provides an overview of employment discrimination law. This casebook also includes a major chapter on wage and hour law, as well as chapters on workplace injuries and employee benefits. A chapter on privacy reflects recent legislative initiatives at the state level and an analysis of electronic intrusions by the employer.Interspersed throughout are excerpts from the Restatement of Employment Law and “Practitioner Perspectives,” in which leading practitioners describe their day-to-day work and area of specialization. Cases are accompanied by notes that test a student’s basic understanding of the material (labeled “Test Your Understanding of the Material”), as well as informative notes providing context.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1186/thumbnail.jp
A Guide to Gathering and Using Legislative History in Massachusetts
Get PDFLawyers must have the ability to interpret statutory language. Whether during criminal or civil litigation, advising a client on recent statutory changes or appearing before an administrative agency, the importance of statutes to the modern legal world is unquestioned. Although some jurists, notably Justice Antonin Scalia, question whether there can be such a thing as legislative intent and disregard materials that may be instructive to the court, most jurisdictions not only accept evidence of legislative intent, but seek it out
Current Issues in Patent Law and Policy
Get PDFPatent law and policy have received a surprising amount of attention from courts and policymakers in recent years. This attention is warranted because innovation policy is critical in determining the pace of innovation and the rate of economic growth. The reform proposals pending before Congress are motivated by widespread reports of abusive patent assertions and fears that patents sometimes stifle innovation. I favor most of the pending reforms and worry that our patent system, on balance, discourages innovation. But I part company from most reform proponents who focus on harms caused by the frivolous patent litigation mounted by many non-practicing entities (NPEs). Instead, I want to focus on deeper flaws in the U.S. patent system that existed before NPEs became very active and that continue today
Criminal Laws on Sex Work and HIV Transmission: Mapping the Laws, considering the Consequence
Get PDFLawmakers historically justify the mobilization of criminal laws on prostitution and HIV as a means of controlling the spread of disease. Over time, however, public health research has conclusively demonstrated that criminal laws on prostitution and HIV significantly impede the ability of sex workers to access services and to live without the stigma and blame associated with being a transmitter of HIV. In turn, mainstream public health approaches to sex work and HIV emphasize decriminalization as a way to improve the lives of sex workers in need of care, treatment, and services. Our current legal system, which criminalizes both prostitution and HIV transmission and exposure, is not in keeping with this decriminalization frame and instead compounds criminal penalties on people charged with prostitution related crimes and undermines HIV efforts.
This Article presents a public health law mapping of U.S. states that mandate HIV testing and criminalize HIV positive sex workers. The mapping demonstrates that laws on HIV transmission and exposure interact with laws on sex work to compound criminal penalties on people charged with prostitution related crimes. In keeping with public health evidence, this Article argues that decriminalization of sex work and HIV transmission and exposure is integral to effectively address the HIV epidemic. The Article seeks to contribute to a growing literature on the necessity of decriminalizing sex work by uncovering how these laws interact to undermine the HIV response
Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm
No full textDue to recent advances in computerized analysis and robotics, automated law enforcement has become technically feasible. Unfortunately, laws were not created with automated enforcement in mind and even seemingly simple laws have subtle features that require programmers to make assumptions when encoding them. We demonstrate this ambiguity with an experiment where a group of 52 programmers was assigned the task of automating traffic speed limit enforcement. A late-model vehicle was equipped with a sensor that collected actual vehicle speed over a one-hour commute. Each programmer (without collaboration) wrote a program that computed the number of speed limit violations and issued mock tickets. Despite quantitative data for both vehicle speed and the speed limit, the number of tickets issued varied from none to one per sensor sample above the speed limit. Our results from the experiment highlight the significant deviation in number and type of citations issued, based on legal interpretations and assumptions made by programmers without legal training. These deviations were mitigated, but not eliminated, in one sub-group that was provided with a legally reviewed software design specification, providing insight into ways to automate the law in the future. Automation of legal reasoning seems to be the most effective in contexts where legal conclusions are predictable because little room exists for choice in a given model; that is, they are determinable. Yet this experiment demonstrates that even relatively narrow and straightforward “rules” are problematically indeterminate in practice
Litigation: Time to Revisit Chevron Difference
Get PDFArticle is a transcript from the 2014 National Lawyers Convention panel on Millennials, Equity, and the Rule of Law. A video recording of the panel can be viewed here.
JUSTICE DON WILLETT: ... because Chevron deference is kind of like bacon. Some people like their Chevron deference rigid and crisp. Other people like it a little squishy and a little bendable. A few people dislike it altogether, no matter how it\u27s served. But Chevron\u27 is now thirty years old, older than a number of people in the audience today, and a lot has changed. The regulatory state has exploded, in terms of size and scope, over the last thirty years, becoming arguably a fourth branch of government altogether.
So, is it time to revisit and think anew about judicial deference to agency decision-making? Do Chevron\u27s virtues outweigh the vices? Have courts gone too far? Has Chevron deference devolved into Chevron dereliction? Are courts moving increasingly from adjudication to abdication, letting the foxes guard the agency henhouse? So it is a thorny question that vexes the Court, and not along the usual ideological lines. We have three former administrative law professors on the U.S. Supreme Court. They have very fervent, strongly held views on Chevron and Chevron deference. And the Court is going to have, undeniably, some pretty high-profile opportunities in the near term, I believe, to revisit and possibly recalibrate Chevron
Defining Hate Speech
Get PDFThere is no shortage of opinions about what should be done about hate speech, but if there is one point of agreement, it is that the topic is ripe for rigorous study. But just what is hate speech, and how will we know it when we see it online? For all of the extensive literature about the causes, harms, and responses to hate speech, few scholars have endeavored to systematically define the term. Where other areas of content analysis have developed rich methodologies to account for influences like context or bias, the present scholarship around hate speech rarely extends beyond identification of particular words or phrases that are likely to cause harm targeted toward immutable characteristics.
This essay seeks to review some of the various attempts to define hate speech, and pull from them a series of traits that can be used to frame hate speech with a higher degree of confidence. In so doing, it explores the tensions between hate speech and principles of freedom of expression, both in the abstract and as they are captured in existing definitions. It also analyzes historical attempts to define the term in the United States, from the brief period of time when the United States punished hate speech directly. From this analysis, eight traits are surfaced that can be used for the development of a confidence scoring system to help ascertain whether a particular expression should be considered one of hate speech or not
When God is Not Green: A World-wide Journey to Places Where Religious Practice and Environmentalism Collide
No full textIn this lively, round-the-world trip, law professor and humorist Jay Wexler explores the intersection of religion and the environment.Did you know that In Hong Kong and Singapore, Taoists burn paper money to appease “hungry ghosts,” filling the air with smoke and dangerous toxins? In Mumbai, Hindus carry twenty-foot-tall plaster of Paris idols of the elephant god Ganesh into the sea and leave them on the ocean floor to symbolize the impermanence of life, further polluting the scarce water resources of western India? In Taiwan, Buddhists practicing “mercy release” capture millions of small animals and release them into inappropriate habitats, killing many of the animals and destroying ecosystems? In Central America, palm frond sales to US customers for Palm Sunday celebrations have helped decimate the rain forests of Guatemala and southern Mexico? In New York, Miami, and other large US cities, Santeria followers sprinkle mercury in their apartments to fend off witches, poisoning those homes for years to come? In Israel, on Lag B’omer, a holiday commemorating a famous rabbi, Jews make so many bonfires that the smoke can be seen from space, and trips to the emergency room for asthma and other pulmonary conditions spike?
Law professor and humorist Jay Wexler travels the globe in order to understand the complexity of these problems and learn how society can best address them. He feasts on whale blubber in northern Alaska, bumps along in the back of a battered jeep in Guatemala, clambers down the crowded beaches of Mumbai, and learns how to pluck a dead eagle in Colorado, all to answer the question “Can religious practice and environmental protection coexist?”https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1024/thumbnail.jp
Soft Skills - The Importance of Cultivating Emotional Intelligence
Get PDFOrganizations hire people for their hard skills, but they end up firing people for their lack of soft skills. In this brief essay, Professor Wheeler, an experienced law library director and personnel manager, discusses soft skills and their importance in the workplace. He posits that emotional intelligence is the basis of what we commonly call soft skills, and although for some these skills are innate, they can be developed and sharpened over time. Wheeler uses personal anecdotes to illustrate how emotional intelligence has enhanced his own professional life
Funding Antibiotic Innovation with Vouchers: Recommendations on How to Strengthen A Flawed Incentive Policy
Get PDFA serious need to spur antibiotic innovation has arisen because of the lack of antibiotics to combat certain conditions and the overuse of other antibiotics leading to greater antibiotic resistance. In response to this need, proposals have been made to Congress to fund antibiotic research through a voucher program for new antibiotics, which would delay generic entry for any drug, even potential blockbuster lifesaving generics. We find this proposal to be inefficient, in part because of the mismatch between the private value of the voucher and the public value of the antibiotic innovation. However, vouchers have the political advantage in the United States of being able to raise sufficient amounts of money without annual appropriations from Congress. We propose that if antibiotic vouchers are to be considered, the design should include dollar and time caps to limit their volatility, sufficient advance notice to protect generic manufacturers, and market-based linkages between the value of the voucher and the value of the antibiotic innovation. We also explore a second option: The federal government could auction vouchers to the highest bidders and use the money to create an antibiotics innovation fund