Workplace Prof Blog

Corrada on Title VII Religion, Active Learning

Today I was privileged to host at Chase Roberto Corrada (Denver), who generously gave two presentations in a single day.  In the first, he spoke about the current divide, in the religious discrimination context, between accommodation and disparate treatment cases, and how that often works to the disadvantage of employees.  His proposal:  integrate the two frameworks.  See Toward an Integrated Disparate Treatment and Accommodation Framework for Title VII Religion Cases.

In his second presentation, Roberto spoke about using full-semester experiential learning techniques in law school courses.  He described how, in Labor Law, he gets his students to form a union and negotiate the grading criteria, and how in Administrative Law, he gets his students to create a regulatory framework for a Jurassic Park-style dinosaur theme park.  He also described the recent empirical work he's been doing to assess student learning in such active-learning environments.

Roberto has a passion for both topics, and it really showed in his fantastic presentations. 

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SEALS: Teaching Labor and Employment Law

Steven Kaminshine (Georgia State) moderated a panel on innovative teaching methods in labor and employment courses.  Yours truly spoke about using full-course simulations in labor and employment courses.  I described the technique, developed by Roberto Corrada (Denver) and Ken Dau-Schmidt (Indiana-Bloomington), of goading students (employees) into organizing a union and negotiating a collective bargaining agreement (syllabus), and also about the sexual harassment litigation simulation I've developed for my employment discrimination and civil procedure courses.  Rachel Arnow-Richman (Denver) followed this up by describing her transactional approach to teaching employment law.  Jeff Hirsch (Tennessee) spoke of the need to teach students to read full original source materials (such as unedited cases), to teach administrative law as part of labor/employment law, and the importance of integrating international issues into labor/employment courses as labor markets become increasingly global.  Finally, Cynthia Nance (Arkansas - Fayetteville) described how she uses the film Live Nude Women Unite in her labor law course to enhance student understanding of a wide variety of labor/employment issues as well as issues related to class, gender, and stereotyping.

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1000 Voices on Work and Family

I use a lot of video in my employment law class in large part because the class covers so many topics at such a superficial level that video can make a subject's complexity resonate more effectively in a much shorter period of time. So we watch a bit of North Country in discussing sexual harassment, and excerpts from Frontline documentaries on low wage workers and retirement for discussing the FLSA and ERISA. Last year I added a documentary on undocumented workers in Texas to try to show how complex the issues of immigration and low wage work are.

So I was pleased when this link to a series by 1000 Voices was e-mailed to me today by Ardi Kuhn (1000 voices) and Sangita Nayak (9 to 5, Nat'l Ass'n of Working Women). The issue they were highlighting was paid sick leave, but there are additional issues in the archive as well. And it's really a collection of personal stories by average people who put a human face on an issue.

And just for background on the larger project, "[t]he 1000 Voices Archive is being produced by Creative Counsel, a media and communications team that has been working with advocates nationally on the paid sick days issue, making sure that their stories are recorded truthfully and effectively." There are a number of other series, too, so if you're like me and use some video (or want to), it's worth checking out.

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Law Students Workers' Rights Conference

The Tenth Annual National Law Students Workers' Rights Conference, sponsored by The Peggy Browning Fund, will be held October 17 & 18, 2008, at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland.  Registration is due by August 28 for students applying for airfare assistance; October 3 for all others.

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Pro se Plaintiffs in Employment Cases

I haven't read any empirical work to support this, but my impression from practice is that employment law, broadly, is one area in which people commonly proceed pro se. In fact, other than prisoner § 1983 suits, and maybe property tax appeals and misdemeanor traffic violations, it's an area in which pro se plaintiffs are common. And one area within employment law that has an especially large number of people proceeding without attorneys is the unemployment insurance benefit field.

This is an area that probably few of us cover much in our classes--either unemployment or dealing with pro se plaintiffs, but perhaps we should. Unemployment insurance is an area that can be used to talk about employment and economic policies in the US, similar to the discussion of minimum and living wages, but with some general discharge policies addressed, too.

And as for the pro se issue, I think that's extremely important. I always felt an extra responsibility in cases involving parties without counsel both to the court, to ensure that it understood both sides of the issues (because the party acting without a lawyer rarely articulated his or her position as well as is possible), and to the party, to ensure that the person without a lawyer understood what was happening in the litigation. This was something that I could manage fairly well as an ethical matter. I was an assistant AG, and had an ethical obligation to do justice, since my client was the people of the state of Illinois, which meant that I had some obligation to look out a little bit for the person proceeding pro se, even though I did not represent that person. It would seem to me that attorneys in private practice would have to walk a bit of a finer line to be sure that their client is appropriately represented.

In any event, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued an interesting decision discussing the role that an administrative adjudicator should play in hearings involving parties pro se. The case is Berkley v. D.C. Transit, and can be found here by searching for case number 07-AA-297. It will be published in A.2d.

In dealing with this question about parties appearing pro se, the court stated

Generally, a pro se litigant is entitled to no special treatment, nor substantial assistance from the judge assigned to her case. However, there are exceptions and circumstances which require special care by the judge, meaning that the pro se litigant is not “left to fend entirely for [herself].” . . . These “special circumstances” include cases involving “merely technical, rather than substantive rules of procedure,” . . . and those concerning a remedial statute.

The court found that the administrative adjudicator here had confused the claimant and had not considered her lack of sophistication in analyzing her testimony. Because of this and because the court found that the adjudicator's findings lacked substantial evidence, the court reversed the decision. Somewhat ironically, the employer was not represented by counsel, either, and didn't appear at the hearing or file anything in the review proceeding.

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Law School Rankings

U.S. News is soliciting comments on two ways it is considering for improving its law school ranking system:

The first idea is that U.S. News should count both full-time and part-time entering student admission data for median LSAT scores and median undergraduate grade-point averages in calculating the school's ranking. U.S. News's current law school ranking methodology counts only full-time entering student data. Many people have told us that some law schools operate part-time J.D. programs for the purpose of enrolling students who have far lower LSAT and undergrad GPAs than the students admitted to the full-time program in order to boost their admission data reported to U.S. News and the ABA. . . . .

[The second idea] calls for U.S. News to compute our bar passage rate component (school's bar pass rate/jurisdiction's bar passage rate) using only the data of first-time takers who are graduates of American Bar Association-accredited schools. Currently, our "jurisdiction's bar passage rate" uses the rate of all first-time test takers from a state regardless of the ABA accreditation of their law schools. This distinction is perhaps most meaningful for the state of California . . . .

And Brian Leiter reports on the sometimes silly lengths some folks will go to try to obtain a marginal increase in the U.S. News rankings.

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Dividing Labor/Employment Law Into Courses

Ron Brown, U. Hawai'i, asked us to post the following query.  In addition to replying to Ron directly, feel free to add a comment to this post, so that others can benefit from your experience.

Do you happen to have any recent surveys or information on how the labor law courses are generally divided in the law schools and the typical course enrollments for each?  For example, I teach Labor Law, Employment Discrimination Law, Employment Law, and Asia International & Comparative Labor Law.  As we re-consider our curriculum here, I would be interested in knowing (1) how other law schools are doing it and (2) an approximation of enrollment numbers in each class.  It would also be helpful to know (3) the approximate number of 2nd and 3d year law students in your school that form the pool of possible enrollees.

Any information you could provide to me would be useful and appreciated.

Please send directly to me at the University of Hawaii.

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Employment Discrimination as a Bar Topic?

Ellen Dannin (Penn St.) writes to tell us of a conversation she had recently with the Bar Examiners in Pennsylvania.  The Pennsylvania bar exam, unlike most, tests employment discrimination.  Dannin asked how it came about that employment discrimination came to be added. They said they understand that the mission of law schools is broader than just teaching to legal practice and were not trying to dictate what was taught. But they did want to send a message to the law schools about what matters for a modern practice and where more preparation might be needed.

Yep.

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Corrada and Arnow-Richmond Awarded Research Professorships

Roberto Corrada and Rachel Arnow-Richman both have been awarded research professorships for the 2008-09 academic year by their home institution, University of Denver Sturm College of Law.  Roberto and Rachel will be relieved of their teaching assignments for the year while they work on significant research projects. 

Roberto will use the professorship to complete research and write a book tentatively entitled Transforming Law Learning.  As many of you know, Roberto pioneered the use of an extended simulation in teaching Labor Law, encouraging his students to organize into a union to bargain for the terms and conditions of the classroom.  With his and Ken Dau-Schmidt's help, I adopted the approach last year myself, and can attest to its success.  Recently, Roberto has been working on assessments and learning outcomes in simulation courses.

Rachel will use the professorship to work on a project entitled Fair Termination in an At-Will World.  Rachel’s work will examine significant changes to the current at-will regime, and will build on her previous work in the employment area.

Denver usually awards at most only one research professorship per year, so its dual award indicates both the incredible accomplishments of the recipients and the school's strong support of its labor and employment law program.

Congratulations!!!

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Wagner Results: NKU Chase Wins!

Congratulations to Scott Van Nice, Benjamin Lewis, Marisa Palmieri (on brief), and Lawrence Rosenthal (coach) for winning the 2008 Wagner Labor & Employment Moot Court Competition at New York Law School.  Scott Van Nice received the best oral advocate award for the final round.  I do not yet know which teams won best briefs.  Congratulations to the Michigan State team for a fantastic final round.

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Addendum:

The preliminary round awards are as follows:

Best Preliminary Round Team:  NKU Chase
Best Preliminary Round Oralist: Cortney Closey (DePaul)
Second-Best Preliminary Round Oralist:  Michael Davis (Stetson)

Best Petitioner's Brief:  Michigan State
Second-Best Petitioner's Brief:  Charleston
Third-Best Petitioner's Brief:  John Marshall

Best Respondent's Brief:  NKU Chase
Second-Best Respondent's Brief:  Southwestern
Third-Best Respondent's Brief:  Texas Wesleyan

Congratulations to the winners and participants.  I can say that, without a doubt, the level of competition overall this year was the best in the several years that I have coached a team in this competition.

-JH

NKU Chase v. Michigan State

     .



V.   

For the second year in a row, team NKU Chase will meet team Michigan State in the final round of the Wagner National Labor & Employment Moot Court Competition at New York Law School.  Congratulations to all competitors & coaches!  The round will be webcast tomorrow here at 2:00 EST.

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Student Brief Writing Competition

Here's a writing opportunity for your students. Linda H. Edwards at Mercer sends out this notice:

It’s time to start thinking about inviting your students to compete for the Milani Award.  As you know, Mercer and the ABA host an annual writing competition in honor of Mercer’s former legal writing professor, Adam Milani.  It is one of the few student competitions for briefs – not academic papers.   Prizes can be as high as $1,000.

Here are this year’s topics: disability law; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972;  ADEA; FMLA; a state statute or municipal ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The deadline is June 1, and further information is on Mercer's website.

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Wagner Starts Today

Best of luck to students and coaches competing in the Wagner National Labor & Employment Law Moot Court Competition!!!  The competition begins today and runs through this Sunday.  The final round will be webcast live on Sunday here. 

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Osler on Ethics, Art, and Principles

The faculty here at Chase had the distinct pleasure Friday of attending a presentation by Mark Osler (Baylor) on "Ethics, Art, and Principles."  Mark showed us how he uses art in his classroom to illustrate important principles that he wants to convey to students.  For example, he uses Norman Rockwell's Mississippi (left) to convey the importance that race still plays in many aspects of American life and legal practice.  Although Mark teaches Criminal Law, Professional Responsibility, and Advocacy, many of the slides he showed -- and the principles he used them to illustrate -- apply equally in the Labor/Employment curriculum.  Even if you don't plan to emulate his approach, it's worth seeing how taking a different pedagogical approach can dramatically enhance understanding of substantive material.  My only regret is that we brought him to Chase  to speak only to the faculty -- if I had it to do over again, I'd make sure our students had the opportunity to see his presentation as well.

If any of you are looking for folks to come speak to your faculty, I'd highly recommend Mark's presentation.

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Wagner Fact Pattern Released

The fact pattern for this year's Wagner Moot Court Competition, hosted every year by New York Law School, has just been released.  Issue one is cat's paw liability.  My former student Tim Davis has written an article on this topic that will be published shortly in Pierce Law Review -- see Beyond the Cat's Paw: An Argument for a Substantially Influences Standard for Title VII and ADEA Liability.  Issue two is transgender discrimination.  Jamie Ireland and I have written an article on that topic that will be published shortly by UCLA Women's Law Journal -- see Transgender Employment Discrimination.

Hat tip: Lawrence Rosenthal.

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ABA-NAF Arbitration Competition

I spent Thursday-Sunday at the American Bar Association / National Arbitration Forum Arbitration Competition regional tournament at Cumberland Law School in Birmingham, Alabama.  As many of you know, I follow arbitration issues closely, and this year the tournament topic involved an employment issue, so a group of students and I organized a couple of teams and our school entered the competition for the first time.  It's a competition I'd highly recommend, not only for students interested in arbitration, but for students interested in advocacy generally.  If you're interested in putting together a team next year, let me know and I'll be happy to share my experiences.

Both Chase teams (photo above) advanced out of the preliminary rounds, and one of them won the tournament. 

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Top-5 Labor SSRN Downloads

1. Aditi Bagchi, Contract v. Promise (51).
2. Paul M. Secunda, Reflections on the Technicolor Right of Association in American Labor and Employment Law (34).
3. David Abraham (photo above), Doing Justice on Two Fronts: The Liberal Dilemma in Immigration (33).
4. Ellen Dannin, Red Tape or Accountability: Privatization, Public-ization, and Public Values (29).
5. Paul M. Secunda, Whither the Pickering Rights of Federal Employees? (27).

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Site Links Students and Practitioners on Research Topics

ACH Research Link, developed by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy,

collects legal research topics submitted by practitioners for law students to explore in faculty-supervised writing projects for academic credit.  Topic authors will receive a copy of the resulting student papers, which ACS will also post in a searchable online library.  By connecting law students and faculty with the research needs of public interest organizations and advocates, ACS ResearchLink will become an increasingly comprehensive and powerful engine for change, while also enhancing the relevance and influence of student academic scholarship.

This seems to me a great idea.  I vividly recall as a student the difficulty of choosing a novel, timely, relevant paper topic at the beginning of a law school course, when by definition I knew very little about the subject of the course.  Because the semester-long time-line for student papers is unlikely to correspond with briefing schedules, it's unlikely that practitioners will use this as a source of free legal research work -- but practitioners working on long-term projects could benefit from getting a different perspective on the legal issues on which they are working.  One caveat: law school professors teaching seminar courses and offering independent studies will need to regularly peruse the site's online library to ensure that student papers are not being recycled.

Hat tip: Mike Whiteman.

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Top-5 International Employment & Labor Law SSRN Downloads

1. Vivek Wadhwa, Ben Rissing, AnnaLee Saxenian, & Gary Gereffi, Education, Entrepreneurship, and Immigration: America's New Entrepreneurs, Part II (294).
2. Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, Fear of Discovery: Immigrant Workers and the Fifth Amendment (130).
3. Anne Marie Lofaso, Approaching Coal Mine Safety from a Comparative Law and Interdisciplinary Perspective (111).
4. Laurence R. Helfer, Monitoring Compliance with Un-Ratified Treaties: The ILO Experience (28).
5. Dr. Rupert Macey-Dare, Harassment Claims and the Jurisdiction of International Administrative Law Tribunals (13).

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You're Fired!

        Yesterday was the first day of my fall semester Employment Law course, and I did things much differently than I have before.  Instead of covering the standard cases on employment at-will, I put together a series of simulations designed to illustrate the concept.  Three students were assigned to be h.r. managers, and they were directed to lay off students who were assigned to be three different employees.  The first employee, who was the sole breadwinner for a family that included a very sick child, tried sympathy.  The second employee, a successful salesperson, tried to negotiate a severance package more generous than the h.r. person was authorized to grant.  The third employee, a line supervisor, tried to intimidate and bully his way out of the layoff, and finally issued a "plausibly deniable" threat of workplace violence.

        I thought the simulations went really well (I invite my students to comment to this post to share their thoughts).  The simulations only took 8-10 minutes apiece, leaving plenty of time for discussion.  (At first, I panicked -- two minutes into the first simulation, the h.r. person and the employee were going around in circles; but then I realized that I should leave it alone, and let the h.r. person try to figure out how to end the interview.)

        The post-simulation discussion was far-reaching.  It included things like orchestrating a layoff (choosing a room, physically setting up a room, handling security), handling the interview (showing empathy, keeping it from becoming too personal (?), reacting to various emotions, ending the interview when the employee wants to keep arguing), and risk-avoidance (avoiding a scene, avoiding potential lawsuits, avoiding workplace violence).  I think the simulations also demonstrated how important a job can be to a person, and how traumatic it can be to lose a job.

        I figure most of my students will be involved in a discharge sooner or later.  The ones who practice employment law will either be advising clients on how (not) to do it, or cleaning up the mess from discharges done badly.  Even a general-practitioner is likely to be faced with firing a secretary or legal assistant at some point.

        After the class, a student who had played the role of an h.r. person commented to me that had been much more difficult than he had expected to fire someone.

        Exactly.

        If anyone would like to see or use the simulations, drop me an email and I'll zap you a copy.

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Call for Applications for NPELRA Foundation Scholarships

Thanks to the LERA-listserv for  bringing to our attention the following call for scholarship applications for those interested in public sector labor relations.

The 411:

The NPELRA Foundation, a subsidiary of the National Public Employer Labor Relations Association, has announced that it will award its eighth round of Anthony C. Russo Scholarships this fall. Human resource, labor and industrial relations, public administration or political science graduate students with an interest in labor and employee relations and the public sector are encouraged to apply.

If you are interested in applying, applications must be postmarked no later than September 28, 2007. Application information and forms can be found at http://npelra.org.

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Dead Grandmothers

As an aside to the Paul Buchanan story, Laura Hartman (DePaul College of Commerce) writes that:

[A] colleague in the business law realm once wrote a wonderfully erudite and statistically appropriate analysis of the likelihood that a student’s grandparent’s would pass away the closer exams approached. In fact, there was a calculation for parents, as well, and even for relatives to pass away a second time if the student was taking a class with a new professor (unless of course that professor were related to a previous professor where the parents had already passed away, because she or he might have heard tell of the first passing . . .). I can’t seem to put my hands on it but perhaps you might be able to locate it. There is a meta-website that discusses some of these tales at Dead-Grandmother Syndrome.

I do not mean at all to poke fun at the Buchanan issue, which itself is quite a serious one involving the future of this gentleman’s career. I just mean to note that we should recognize that each story might be more than the picture one email might paint.

[For more, see Inside Higher Ed's The Time of Dead Grandmothers.]

If anyone is familiar with the "dead grandmothers" article, please let us know!

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Getting Fired for Off-Duty Conduct

Most employment casebooks have a case or two about employee privacy expectations and off-duty conduct.  An article by Carol Hymowitz in yesterday's Wall Street Journal points out that the issue no longer is just about rank-and-file employees -- today, there are myriad examples of high-level executives and CEOs getting fired for getting drunk, sleeping around, and acting disgracefully at company parties.  Hymowitz quotes Doug Schwarz, an attorney with Bingham McCutchen in New York:

It used to be that as long as an executive performed well on the job, no one cared much about what they [sic] were doing in their free time -- or even behind closed doors in the office.  But a sea change has occurred, with every aspect of managers' conduct being scrutinized -- and ever more closely the higher up one goes.

The article is Personal Boundaries Shrink as Companies Punish Bad Behavior (subscription required).

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What Is Sex?

I devote the first class of my Employment Discrimination course to discussing the social construction of the classifications prohibited by Title VII and other antidiscrimination laws.  Race, for example, is undefinable by skin color, geographic origin, or genetics, so it is socially (and sometimes legally) defined instead.  Similarly, a person in a wheelchair is not dis-abled from entering a building if the building's steps are replaced with a ramp.

It's been clear for a long time that many characteristics often associated with sex are socially-created stereotypes.  Nonetheless, for the most part, we've assumed that sex is definable, either by physical sex features or by a male/female switch on the Y chromosome.

However, recent research by Eric Vilain (photo above), a geneticist at UCLA, calls that assumption into question.  His research indicates that sex is determined by "a delicate dance between a variety of promale, antimale, and possibly profemale genes."  In a given person, not all of those genes will necessarily point in the same direction.  Thus, like race, sex may not be binary at all, but may instead exist on a continuum.

For more, see Sally Lehrman, Going Beyond X and Y, Scientific American (June 2007).

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Annual Arbitration Competition to Feature Employment Contracts

The 2007-08 Annual Arbitration Competition, cosponsored by the American Bar Association Law Student Division and the National Arbitration Forum, will feature a dispute concerning an employment contract.

The Arbitration Competition began in 2005 with a national competition and continued with its first regional and national finals in the fall of 2006. The goal of the competition is to enhance the advocacy skills of law students in the arbitration forum. Teams of four law students compete, with two acting as advocates and two acting as witnesses.  Regional competitions will be held in November; the national competition will be held January 2008 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

For more information see the Competition's website (linked above) or contact Ben Davis.

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Corrada's Innovative Labor Law Teaching Featured

Kudos to Roberto Corrada (Denver) for having his innovative labor law teaching techniques featured on his school's website.  Here's a taste from the article on his labor law class:

In Roberto Corrada's labor law class, students have a seat at the negotiating table the day they walk through the door.

Corrada, a professor at the Sturm College of Law since 1990, has students in the labor law class form a union. The union then negotiates the terms and conditions of the class, including the grading curve, the types of exams and the way students participate in class.

"My labor law classroom is our workplace," Corrada says. "In a work environment, workers show up and try to please the boss so that they can get paid. Students are often even more deferential to the teacher because they are working to get paid, too. They want a good grade."

This inventive approach to teaching labor law has garnered Corrada his share of attention in legal and academic circles across the nation.

The article gives you the chance to "go inside Corrada's classroom" and see the master in action.  I love the fact that the class's representation election was overseen by a real official from the NLRB, with voting booths and everything!

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Respirators

Folks teaching from the Friedman & Strickler discrimination casebook will recall the Fitzpatrick disparate impact case in which African-American sufferers of PFB sued the Atlanta Fire Department over its no-beard policy.  Atlanta said the policy was necessary to make sure the respirators fit correctly.  An article on the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal indicates that respirator manufacturers are having a difficult time to get the things to fit anyone properly.  Turns out they've always been tested on "white men of Eurpoean descent," and -- no surprise -- there are alot of firefighters out there now who don't fit that description.

As an aside, the article mentions a recent NIOSH studyfinding that 86% of all American firefighters, 73% of American healthcare workers, and 91% of workers in law enforcement are overweight or obese.  Whoa.

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Employment Law Work Songs to Use in Class!

Steve Befort (Minnesota), the hippest guy in the labor and employment law professor world (barring Alex Long maybe), writes:

For a number of years I have thought about playing selected work songs in the classroom prior to the beginning of class. During the fall 2006 semester, I finally pulled it off. I copied songs onto audio discs and embedded links to the songs on my power point slides. I would then play one of the songs at about 3-5 minutes before the start of each Employment Law class session. I tried to match up songs with the subject matter of the particular class (e.g., Allentown and plant closings), but most of the time I figured that any song about work would do. I had a few technological miscues along the way, but for the most part it worked out quite well.  The students generally seemed to like it, or were at least mildly amused. I asked for student song ideas and got several suggestions, which resulted in a playlist that was not as badly dated as initially compiled.

Now that sounds like one fun employment law class. Here is the list of the songs employed (get it? (moan)).

Steve would like to hear if others have any suggestions to add to the list and would be happy to share technical information about how to embed links on power point slides.

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Wagner Results -- Complete

Wagner Champion Team

• Michigan State University College of Law (Sean Caruthers & Susan Lumetta (pictured above), coached by Robert Filiatrault and assisted by Michael Zimmer)

Wagner Runner-Up Team

• Northern Kentucky University, Salmon P. Chase College of Law (Tiffany Yahr, Tim Davis, & Marci Palmieri (on brief), coached by Lawrence Rosenthal)

Best Oral Advocate, Final Round

• Sean Caruthers, Michigan State University College of Law

Best Preliminary Round Team

• Michigan State University College of Law

Top Two Preliminary Round Oral Advocates

• Kathleen Dodd from University of Tennessee School of Law
• Sean Caruthers from Michigan State University College of Law

 Best Petitioner Brief

• Loyola University Chicago School of Law
• Michigan State University College of Law

Best Respondent Brief

• Northern Kentucky University, Salmon P. Chase College of Law
• University of San Francisco School of Law
• Texas Weslayan University School of Law

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Wagner Results

Congratulations to Sean Caruthers and Susan Lumetta (coached by Robert Filiatrault and assisted by Michael Zimmer) of Michigan State for winning the Wagner National Labor & Employment Law Moot Court Competition today at New York Law School!  Congratulations to Tiffany Yahr, Tim Davis, and Marci Palmieri (on brief) (coached by Lawrence Rosenthal) of Northern Kentucky University, Chase College of Law, for taking Best Brief and for placing second overall.  Congratulations to Katie Dodd (Tennessee) for her win as best preliminary round oralist.

I'll update this post as I receive more information.

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Wagner Moot Court Competition

Congratulations and best of luck to all those competing in the Wagner Moot Court Competition this weekend!  For those unable to attend, the final round will be webcast live on Sunday, March 11, at 2:00 p.m.

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BNA Revives Summary of Circuit Splits

Thanks to Carol Bredemeyer for pointing out to me that BNA's United States Law Week has revived its "circuit splits" roundup, effective with its January 2, 2007 issue.  I've found that the roundup is a fantastic source of topics for student research papers, and I've missed its absence over the last year or so.

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New Employment Law Casebook

Congratulations to Timothy Glynn, Rachel Arnow-Richman, and Charles Sullivan on the publication of their new casebook Employment Law: Private Ordering and Its Limitations.  Here's how Professor Glynn describes the casebook:

As the title suggests, the book is organized around the enduring conflict between private ordering and public mandates in the workplace.  There is a constantly changing border between the default rule allowing employers and workers to structure their relationships (usually to the employer's specifications) and public policy limits on that approach. This provides a lens that makes the course more coherent for students and, hopefully, even for teachers.

With that as the thematic backdrop, the book approaches traditional topics in innovative ways, such as devoting a chapter to accommodating workers’ lives and another to risk management techniques – often the bread and butter of employment practice.  It also is especially attentive to increasing concerns regarding employer-employee competition.  Overall, the book strikes a balance between a traditional litigation orientation and the counseling/planning perspectives that prevail in many employment-law practices, whether for employer or employee.

The book is published by Aspen, and though I received my review copy yesterday, Aspen does not appear to have the book up on its website yet.

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Conscious Sedation

This employment ad from the Irish Times is courtesy Brian Leiter, at Brian Leiter's Law School Reports:

Madam, - This week's Health Supplement publishes an employment advertisement from Trinity College for a "Lecturer in Conscious Sedation". It is not clear whether this job description refers to the preferred state of mind of the academics who are sought, or to the effect applicants are intended to have on their students.  In either case, no doubt there will be a wide range of qualified candidates from within the third level system. - Yours, etc,

DAVID LOWE, Abingdon Park, Shankill, Dublin 18.

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