An Equally Divided Court : Workplace Law in the U.S. Supreme Court 2015-2016

The 2015-2016 Term of the United States Supreme Court was scarcely halfway over when Justice Antonin Scalia passed away on February 12, 2016. This event and the political gridlock over his successor defined the Term in some ways more than the actual decisions of the Court, particularly when the resulting vacancy led an “equally divided” Supreme Court to affirm the courts below in a one sentence judgment. The most watched of these cases in workplace law was Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, where the Supreme Court’s 4-4 tie avoided the overruling of decades of precedent upholding the constitutionality of agency shop agreements in the public sector. The oral argument and the deadlocked vote which resulted from the unexpected death of Justice Scalia spotlighted the laws governing unions and collective bargaining as among the most politically polarized issues on the Court’s docket. Besides another case involving the Constitution in the context of a mayoral election campaign, and a case involving the scope of an exemption under the Fair Labor Standards Act, other workplace law cases in this Term focused on procedural interpretations, rather than making major changes or new pronouncements of law. Nonetheless, with the new Trump Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, there will be several examples of politically charged issues and cases on the front burner in the future

Foreword: The Workplace Law Agenda of the Obama Administration

Professor Ruben Garcia introduces a Symposium issue of the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal focused on an assessment of several key aspects of the workplace law record thus far of President Barack Obama

Critical Race Theory and Proposition 187: The Racial Politics of Immigration Law

Immigration law and politics have been historically intertwined with racial prejudice. Many of those who have called for immigration restrictions have also sought an end to the racial and cultural diversity brought by immigrants. With the end of legally sanctioned race discrimination in the 1960s, immigration rhetoric has lost some of its overt racist overtones. However, in the 1990s, many politicians and lawmakers have emphasized the difference between “legal” and “illegal” immigration. This change begs a central question: Have the racist motivations of past immigration law and policy been completely displaced by a concern for law and order? This Comment argues that immigration law and policy continue to be at least partially motivated by a drive for cultural and racial homogeneity. This Comment uses Critical Race Theory as a vehicle to explore the racial underpinnings of immigration law and policy. Critical Race Theory is a theoretical framework that explores the ways that purportedly race-neutral laws and policies perpetuate racial subordination. The repeated assertions that anti-immigration measures are not racially motivated make immigration law and policy a unique candidate for analysis through a Critical Race lens. This Comment will focus on Proposition 187, the November 1994 California ballot initiative passed by the voters which, if declared constitutional by the courts, would deny education and numerous social services to undocumented immigrants. This Comment argues that Proposition 187 was not passed to punish undocumented immigrants, nor out of a wish to return to the “rule of law,” as many of its proponents argued. Rather, it was propelled by fears of the increasing racial diversity of California and the United States. In this way, Proposition 187 is consistent with the racism underlying the history of United States immigration law and policy

Workplace Law Cases in the Tenth Term Of The Roberts Court: Between the Usual Ideological Lines

My review of the Supreme Court\u27s October 2014 Term will focus on cases involving workplace law statutes such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (LMRA) and the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 (WPA). These cases can be viewed through the lens of the following trends: 1) the Court continues its judicial narrowing of the Fair Labor Standards Act and federal labor law; 2) plaintiffs who have the backing of the administrative agencies are more likely to be successful; and 3) some justices are concerned that the Court will not adequately check the power of these in the future