A Vague and Subjective Standard with Impractical Effects: The Need for Congressional Intervention after Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White

The anti-retaliation provision of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees who report perceived workplace discrimination or who otherwise participate in the investigative or enforcement process of alleged Title VII discrimination. The statute provides little guidance, however, as to the scope of this protection. Thus, disagreement abounded among the lower federal courts, not only as to whether the anti-retaliation provision prohibited employer acts outside the workplace as well as within, but also as to the level of severity to which an alleged retaliatory act must rise in order to support a claim. The Supreme Court sought to resolve this disagreement in June 2006 when it decided Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White, but its decision fails to supply a clear, judicially administrable standard by which employers can readily abide. Instead, by focusing its inquiry into the statute’s language and underlying purposes too narrowly, the Court’s decision is plagued by a vague standard with a highly subjective component that insulates employees who engage in protected activity from even the slightest workplace changes. This vague and subjective standard not only lacks sufficient support in the statute but also directly contravenes Title VII’s policies of workplace equality, employer forethought, and management prerogative. Moreover, courts will likely struggle to administer this standard with any substantial degree of consistency, and well-meaning employers will find compliance extremely difficult as a result. This Article therefore proposes that Congress intervene to correct the problems that the Court’s decision in White creates. Specifically, this Article suggests that Congress amend the anti-retaliation provision so that its language more closely mirrors that found in the statute’s core substantive provision, and the better-developed standards thereunder may control discrimination and retaliation claims alike

The Times They Are a-Changin’: Shifting Norms and Employee Privacy in the Technological Era

When it comes to employee privacy rights in emerging technologies, the times they are a-changin’. In the dawn of the modern technological era, when electronic mail and the Internet were in their relative infancy, the right to privacy meant almost nothing in the workplace. Employers could promise that e-mail would not be monitored, but then proceed to do so anyway. When employees sued, seeking vindication of their perceived privacy rights, courts cast aside any notion that an employee could expect privacy in the workplace, and they did so almost uniformly. The tide, however, appears to be turning. Judicial decisions rendered in more recent years, coupled with comparable statutory reform initiatives, suggest that as social norms shift in light of the rapid development and mainstreaming of modern technologies, the law is affording protection to employees that previously did not exist. This Article takes a retrospective-comparative approach to this turning tide, delving deeply into the law of the early era of modern technology and juxtaposing it against more recent developments. The result is exposition of an unmistakable trend favoring employee rights. This Article therefore tackles head-on the ultra-modern legal problem of workplace privacy rights in emerging technologies, but it does so in novel ways, as the first to suggest that the trend is shifting toward greater recognition of employee rights at the expense of employer prerogative

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The present and future of QCD

This White Paper presents an overview of the current status and future perspective of QCD research, based on the community inputs and scientific conclusions from the 2022 Hot and Cold QCD Town Meeting. We present the progress made in the last decade toward a deep understanding of both the fundamental structure of the sub-atomic matter of nucleon and nucleus in cold QCD, and the hot QCD matter in heavy ion collisions. We identify key questions of QCD research and plausible paths to obtaining answers to those questions in the near future, hence defining priorities of our research over the coming decades

The present and future of QCD

This White Paper presents an overview of the current status and future perspective of QCD research, based on the community inputs and scientific conclusions from the 2022 Hot and Cold QCD Town Meeting. We present the progress made in the last decade toward a deep understanding of both the fundamental structure of the sub-atomic matter of nucleon and nucleus in cold QCD, and the hot QCD matter in heavy ion collisions. We identify key questions of QCD research and plausible paths to obtaining answers to those questions in the near future, hence defining priorities of our research over the coming decades

Exponential growth, high prevalence of SARS-CoV-2, and vaccine effectiveness associated with the Delta variant

SARS-CoV-2 infections were rising during early summer 2021 in many countries associated with the Delta variant. We assessed RT-PCR swab-positivity in the REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission-1 (REACT-1) study in England. We observed sustained exponential growth with average doubling time (June-July 2021) of 25 days driven by complete replacement of Alpha variant by Delta, and by high prevalence at younger less-vaccinated ages. Unvaccinated people were three times more likely than double-vaccinated people to test positive. However, after adjusting for age and other variables, vaccine effectiveness for double-vaccinated people was estimated at between ~50% and ~60% during this period in England. Increased social mixing in the presence of Delta had the potential to generate sustained growth in infections, even at high levels of vaccination