Sometime in the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will issue its decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, one of the most closely watched cases of this Term. In that case, Jack Phillips, the co-owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop, a... More »
So far, President Trump has appointed a Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, who may cast the deciding vote to upend decades of settled labor law in two major cases, Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis and Janus v. AFSCME; he has nominated dozens of right-wing lawyers... More »
Mark Janus’s lawyers are desperate to have the Court decide Janus v. AFSCME without considering any facts. Janus is an Illinois state employee, who is represented by AFSCME Council 31. Like all other employees in his bargaining unit, he is required to pay fa... More »
Most of the coverage of Janus v. AFSCME, like this recent piece in USA Today, simply (and perhaps correctly) assumes that the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court will use the case to overturn Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the 1977 case uphol... More »
Unpaid interns who sued Hearst magazines under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) recently learned an important lesson: judges often make law in the guise of statutory interpretation. The lawsuit against Hearst, along with a similar lawsuit against Fox Sear... More »
While the media was focusing on the drama over the Republican tax bill, last week the new Republican majority on the National Labor Relations Board issued five decisions overturning precedents: UPMC, Hy-Brand Industrial Contractors, The Boeing Company, Raythe... More »
The petitioner’s opening brief in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 contains many eyebrow-raising assertions, but one of the most audacious claims is that “enforcement of a collective bargaining agreement, such as through the grievance process, is just as political a... More »
Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a flood of alarming reports about powerful men who have engaged in repeated acts of sexual harassment, sometimes stretching across decades. Many women who had previously remained silent or shared their stories only with clo... More »
When the Obama NLRB modernized the Board’s election rules and eliminated some unnecessary delays, employers characterized the result as “ambush elections,” and insisted they would no longer have enough time to wage their anti-union campaigns. Even though the ... More »
While I agree with Ben that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones violated the National Labor Relations Act when he threatened to bench players who refuse to stand for the national anthem, if the facts were slightly different the players would face a much starker c... More »
The day after the Epic Systems oral argument, the National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel, Richard Griffin, sent an unusual letter to the Court. He disavowed his own answers to a line of questions by Chief Justice Roberts, and instead, he said that t... More »
The employers in the consolidated cases of Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, Ernst & Young LLP v. Morris, and NLRB v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc. hired Paul Clement, one of the most formidable Supreme Court advocates, to present their oral argument, but even he couldn... More »