By altering workplace power relationships and employers’ incentives, minimum wage laws help ensure social equality

Egalitarian liberals have long been sceptical about a minimum wage, arguing that taxation and transfer programs are better at ensuring distributive justice. But even if we accept the claim that the minimum wage increases unemployment, there are grounds for the minimum wage on the basis of justice. Brishen Rogers argues that it helps reduce work-based class and status divisions

What Does Social Equality Require of Employers? A Response to Professor Bagenstos

Individual employment law can appear a bit like tort law did in the late nineteenth century: an eclectic gallery of wrongs united largely by the fact that they do not fit into another doctrinal category. The field has emerged interstitially and today includes an array of state and federal common law and statutory claims not covered by labor law or employment discrimination law. These other subfieldshave foundational statutes: the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, respectively. Each was passed in response to a major social conflict, and each defines some jurisdictional boundaries. Given its decentralized origins, can individual employment law even have a normative core? Yes it can, or so argues Professor Samuel Bagenstos. Just as tort theorists have long sought to render the field coherent by mapping principles at work across categories of tort cases, Bagenstos identifies a rough order within this apparent doctrinal mishmash. Individual employment law, he argues, characteristically seeks to ensure that hierarchies of work do not harden into class-type hierarchies of person or into more widespread relationships of domination and subordination. This ideal of social equality renders certain doctrines coherent and explains longstanding critiques of other doctrines, and it does so better than theories based on ensuring efficiency or rectifying unequal bargaining power. Bagenstos also roots this argument in first principles of social justice, demonstrating an overlapping consensus among major strands of contemporary political theory to the effect that a just society will eliminate persistent hierarchies of status. I strongly agree with this argument. I also believe that Bagenstos\u27s article helps answer a vexing question within employment law: When are employer duties justified even if they reduce efficiency and do not target immoral behavior by employers? But I would emphasize different aspects of social equality in certain instances, and I am not optimistic that social egalitarian ideals will strongly influence courts in the run of cases. In this brief Essay, I take up these matters in turn

Labor Law, Antitrust Law, and Economics Professors\u27 Comment on the National Labor Relations Board\u27s Proposed Joint-Employer Rule

Comment drafted to the National Labor Relations Board\u27s request for comment on a proposed rule-making to define what constitutes a joint employer for the purposes of the National Labor Relations Act\u27s strictures

Testimony on Pennsylvania SB1306: No Additional Protections for Religious Freedom

On behalf of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project (PRPCP) at Columbia Law School I offer the following legal analysis of Senate Bill 1306. Overall, the current version of the bill promises to modernize Pennsylvania’s Human Relations Act by expanding antidiscrimination protections in employment to include sexual orientation and gender identity-based discrimination. Were the Pennsylvania legislature to pass SB 1306, the Commonwealth would join twenty-two states that include sexual orientation and nineteen states that include gender identity in their laws assuring equal employment opportunities for their citizens

The role of law in global value chains: a research manifesto

Most scholars attribute the development and ubiquity of global value chains to economic forces, treating law as an exogenous factor, if at all. By contrast, we assert the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and governance of Global Value Chains (GVCs), and thereby seek to establish the study of law and GVCs as rich and important terrain for research in its own righ

The role of law in global value chains: a research manifesto

Most scholars attribute the development and ubiquity of global value chains to economic forces, treating law as an exogenous factor, if at all. By contrast, we assert the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and governance of Global Value Chains (GVCs), and thereby seek to establish the study of law and GVCs as rich and important terrain for research in its own righ

The role of law in global value chains: a research manifesto

Most scholars attribute the development and ubiquity of global value chains to economic forces, treating law as an exogenous factor, if at all. By contrast, we assert the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and governance of Global Value Chains (GVCs), and thereby seek to establish the study of law and GVCs as rich and important terrain for research in its own right. </div