Taliento v. Portland West Neighborhood Council: The At Will Doctrine Continues to Thrive in Maine

In Taliento v. Portland West Neighborhood Planning Council, Neil Taliento, a program director at Portland West, brought suit against his former employer claiming breach of contract for improper discharge, and alleging that Portland West failed to follow the procedure for termination set forth in its personnel policy. The trial court granted Portland West\u27s motion for summary judgment, concluding that Taliento had failed to establish that he was anything other than an employee-at-will, irrespective of the plain language of Portland West\u27s Personnel Policy and its seemingly binding nature. Subsequently, Taliento appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine. Taliento provided the Law Court with an opportunity to consider whether personnel policies should be interpreted as binding, implied contracts between employer and employee. The Law Court found that Taliento was an employee for an indefinite term and, therefore, was terminable at the will of Portland West. This Author contends that there was, however, an implied contract between Taliento and Portland West. At the very least, an issue of material fact existed that should have been submitted to a jury. The trend in a majority of jurisdictions has been toward limiting the traditional employee-at-will doctrine. There are legitimate reasons why Maine should follow that trend. For example, as a matter of public policy, employers should not have employee handbook provisions and personnel policies that bind only the employees. To an unwitting employee, such policies appear to be binding on both parties and effectively lead the employee into a false sense of security. In reality, the policies are worth little more to the employee than the paper on which they are written. The majority of jurisdictions have recognized personnel policies and employee handbooks as creating an implied contract between employer and employee. These jurisdictions reason that offer, acceptance, and consideration are ascertainable in these “handbook cases.” Although many times employee handbooks contain unilateral offers to contract, they are offers nonetheless. These jurisdictions intimate that if employers want to avoid changing the employee\u27s durational status, they have the option of boldly disclaiming that the policies constitute a part of the employee\u27s employment contract. Maine has gone to great lengths to prevent handbooks and personnel policies from changing employees\u27 durational status. This Author contends that contract principles should be applied with uniformity regardless of the substance of the dispute and especially in these handbook cases in which the elements of an implied-in-fact contract are so readily apparent. It is with these issues of contract law that this Note ultimately concerns itself

Christian truth

The article Suppressing minorities with religion, which appeared in Friday\u27s Maine Campus, is based on stereotypes and ignorance

The Nebraska Uniform Gifts to Minors Act

For years attorneys have been plagued by obstacles when their clients make gifts to minors. The purpose of this study is to point out some of these difficulties and to discuss the Uniform Gifts to Minors Act, which has been adopted in many jurisdictions, including Nebraska. Major difficulties are the inability of the minor to deal freely with property, and the widespread and justifiable hesitation to deal with infants. This problem becomes especially acute when a donor wishes to transfer securities because it is generally imperative for effective management that stock certificates be easily transferable. The objects of the act are (1) to provide a simple method of making gifts to minors which is standardized and orderly and (2) to satisfy the provisions of the 1954 Internal Revenue Code relating to the annual gift tax exclusion of $3,000 and to have the income from the gift taxable as a separate entity in the hands of minor. I. Introduction II. Examination of Potential Solutions … A. Guardianship as a Solution … B. Trust as a Solution … C. Less Formal Methods as Solutions III. The Act—Effect … A. Giving Stock in Registered Form … B. Giving Money … C. Conflict Problems … D. Section by Section Analysis … 1. Choice of a Custodian … 2. Powers in Trust … 3. Investment Standard … 4. Custodial Compensation … 5. Exonerating Provisions … 6. Stock Transfer Procedure … E. Tax Consequences … 1. Gift Tax … 2. Income Tax … 3. Estate Ta

The Gerudo Problem: The Ideology of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

This paper largely considers the ideological constructs of the 1998 Nintendo video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, wherein the various ideologies and beliefs, assumptions, and values expressed and espoused by the game through dialogue, gameplay, and setting/character construction, are discovered and analyzed by identifying presented and suggested elements. Through an ideological critique, I argue that through the game’s portrayal of a Western European-stylized colonist power as a benign imperial influence and of other cultures as impotent and/or evil others, Western colonialism is idealized as an acceptable norm. The use of racial stereotyping through fantasy race-based societies serves to designate acceptable and unacceptable others especially in regards to Eastern/Orient-stereotyped cultures

PT-Symmetric Quantum Electrodynamics and Unitarity

More than 15 years ago, a new approach to quantum mechanics was suggested, in which Hermiticity of the Hamiltonian was to be replaced by invariance under a discrete symmetry, the product of parity and time-reversal symmetry, $\mathcal{PT}$. It was shown that if $\mathcal{PT}$ is unbroken, energies were, in fact, positive, and unitarity was satisifed. Since quantum mechanics is quantum field theory in 1 dimension, time, it was natural to extend this idea to higher-dimensional field theory, and in fact an apparently viable version of $\mathcal{PT}$-invariant quantum electrodynamics was proposed. However, it has proved difficult to establish that the unitarity of the scattering matrix, for example, the K\"all\'en spectral representation for the photon propagator, can be maintained in this theory. This has led to questions of whether, in fact, even quantum mechanical systems are consistent with probability conservation when Green's functions are examined, since the latter have to possess physical requirements of analyticity. The status of $\mathcal{PT}$QED will be reviewed in this report, as well as the general issue of unitarity.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures. Revised version includes new evidence for the violation of unitarit