Legal Implications of Drug Testing in the Private Sector

Drug testing, or perhaps more appropriately substance abuse testing, is a double-edged sword in the private sector. Not only can the employer be sued as the result of testing but he can be sued for not testing. Private employers find themselves in the classic damned if you do, damned if you don\u27t situation. Large corporations are seen as deep pockets when matched against one of their employees and if the plaintiff\u27s lawyer can find an issue and then get his or her case to the jury, corporate pockets can be very deep indeed. Hence, before examining the legal implications of testing, there is good reason to consider the legal implications of not testing

Legal Implications of Drug Testing in the Private Sector

Drug testing, or perhaps more appropriately substance abuse testing, is a double-edged sword in the private sector. Not only can the employer be sued as the result of testing but he can be sued for not testing. Private employers find themselves in the classic damned if you do, damned if you don\u27t situation. Large corporations are seen as deep pockets when matched against one of their employees and if the plaintiff\u27s lawyer can find an issue and then get his or her case to the jury, corporate pockets can be very deep indeed. Hence, before examining the legal implications of testing, there is good reason to consider the legal implications of not testing

Pregnant Employees, Working Mothers and the Workplace - Legislation, Social Change and Where We are Today

Accordingly, the focus of this Article is on the legal and social evolution resulting from the Civil Rights Act\u27s prohibition of sex-based discrimination- and, in particular, pregnancy-related discrimination - in the workplace. Section II of this Article details the reluctance with which courts and employers initially extended workplace rights to women. Sections III and IV discuss Title VII\u27s prohibition against sex discrimination and initial court hesitation to interpret that prohibition to include employees discriminated against on the basis of pregnancy. Sections V and VI provide an overview of federal and Ohio law granting pregnancy-related rights to women, including the PDA, the Family Medical Leave Act and Ohio Revised Code Chapter 4112. Section VII of this Article examines problematic pregnancy-related workplace perceptions, including how the modern woman\u27s entry and acceptance into the workplace remains complicated by traditional notions of proper female roles. Finally, this Article asks whether stereotypical perceptions of what characteristics comprise the ideal worker (e.g., office face-time ) continue to feed negative perceptions of working mothers, slow their workplace advancement and ultimately contribute to many mothers\u27 decisions to simply opt-out of their careers. Section VIII contains suggestions for legislative and corporate policy changes that speak to modern realities regarding pregnancy discrimination, specifically, and female workplace advancement, more generally

Recovering Grammar Relationships for the Java Language Specification

Grammar convergence is a method that helps discovering relationships between different grammars of the same language or different language versions. The key element of the method is the operational, transformation-based representation of those relationships. Given input grammars for convergence, they are transformed until they are structurally equal. The transformations are composed from primitive operators; properties of these operators and the composed chains provide quantitative and qualitative insight into the relationships between the grammars at hand. We describe a refined method for grammar convergence, and we use it in a major study, where we recover the relationships between all the grammars that occur in the different versions of the Java Language Specification (JLS). The relationships are represented as grammar transformation chains that capture all accidental or intended differences between the JLS grammars. This method is mechanized and driven by nominal and structural differences between pairs of grammars that are subject to asymmetric, binary convergence steps. We present the underlying operator suite for grammar transformation in detail, and we illustrate the suite with many examples of transformations on the JLS grammars. We also describe the extraction effort, which was needed to make the JLS grammars amenable to automated processing. We include substantial metadata about the convergence process for the JLS so that the effort becomes reproducible and transparent