- Will California suit against GrubHub strangle the gig economy? [Cyrus Farivar/ArsTechnica, Megan Rose Dickey/TechCrunch, Jon Steingart/Bloomberg]
- “The War on Work — And How To End It” [Edward Glaeser, City Journal via John Cochrane (“It is interesting that our political class says it wants more Americans to work. Yet there are few activities as hit by disincentives and regulatory barriers than the simple act of paying another person to do something for you.”)
- North Carolina attorney Jonathan Harkavy does an annual Supreme Court employment law roundup of which the latest installment is here;
- Restaurant owner who wrote in favor of higher minimum wage shutters eatery in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood: ““The specifics of the paperwork that restaurants in SF and California have to do are overwhelming….Being an owner-operator is a really taxing job.” [SF Eater, Slate in 2014]
- “Analyzing James Damore’s Employment-Related Claims against Google” [Matthew Bodie/On Labor, one, two, three; related, Suzanne Lucas]
- “New labor code for France?” [Jeff Hirsch, Workplace Prof referencing 2013 article with Sam Estreicher, “Comparative Wrongful Dismissal Law: Reassessing American Exceptionalism“]
Thom Lambert, “How to Regulate: A Guide for Policymakers”
In the mail: Thom Lambert (University of Missouri School of Law), “How to Regulate: A Guide for Policymakers” from Cambridge, with blurbs from Cass Sunstein and the Hon. Doug Ginsburg. [Amazon, more] Summary:
Markets sometimes fail. But so do regulatory efforts to correct market failures. Sometimes regulations reach too far, condemning good activities as well as bad, and sometimes they don’t reach far enough, allowing bad behavior to persist. In this highly instructive book, Thomas A. Lambert explains the pitfalls of both extremes while offering readers a manual of effective regulation, showing how the best regulation maximizes social welfare and minimizes social costs. Working like a physician, Lambert demonstrates how regulators should diagnose the underlying disease and identify its symptoms, potential remedies for it, and their side effects before selecting the regulation that offers the greatest net benefit. This book should be read by policymakers, students, and anyone else interested in understanding how the best regulations are crafted and why they work.
In January, Thom wrote more about the book at Truth on the Market, including an introduction and a followup on externalities.
FDA: “‘Love’ is not a common or usual name of an ingredient.”
The Food and Drug Administration gets all dour and bureaucratic about a granola maker’s listing of “love” among its list of ingredients: “Your Nashoba Granola label lists ingredient ‘Love,’…‘Love’ is not a common or usual name of an ingredient.” [Anna Edney, Bloomberg, warning letter]
Canada’s inquiry into wrongful climate advocacy
A Canadian government agency investigated three organizations accused of “climate denial” for 14 months after Ecojustice, a leading environmental pressure group, sought criminal charges [Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun] While the bureau eventually discontinued the probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”, it reserved the option to reopen it “should it receive relevant new information from the public.” We have followed the efforts of state attorneys general including New York’s Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts’s Maura Healey to attach legal consequences to improper advocacy on climate topics; see also our free speech in Canada tag.
Can employees recover overtime for after-hours work they never reported at the time?
When we last examined Allen v. City of Chicago — a case in which a class of Chicago police officers claimed their employer owed them unpaid overtime for their time spent reading emails off-duty on their smartphones—an Illinois federal court had dismissed the claims, holding that most of the emails were incidental and non-essential to the officers’ work, and, regardless, the employer lacked specific knowledge of non-compensated off-duty work.
[In August] – in what is believed to be the first, and only, federal appellate court decision on whether an employer owes non-exempt employees overtime for time spent off-duty reading emails on a smartphone — the 7th Circuit affirmed [pdf].
While under existing precedent an employer must pay for all off-hours work it knows about even if the work is unwelcome and against its policy, it is evidently not required to pay for work that it never learned about at the time because employees ignored a policy requiring them to report it.
“Football Coach Sued for Copyright Infringement Over Retweet”
“You better think twice before hitting retweet because there are some vengeful potential plaintiffs out there. King’s College and its football coach were sued for copyright infringement for retweeting a link to an unauthorized image of a single page of a book.” [Michael Lee, Morrison Lee via Timothy Geigner, Techdirt]
“The Dead Man Who Sued to Make Himself Alive”
As of 2014, Donald E. Miller, Jr. was still alive according to the federal government, except in the state of Ohio, where he was legally dead. [Dan Lewis, Now I Know]
Alexander Pope on litigation
Alexander Pope’s translation of a poem by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, via Eugene Volokh:
Once (says an author; where, I need not say)
Two Trav’lers found an Oyster in their way;
Both fierce, both hungry; the dispute grew strong,
While Scale in hand Dame Justice passed along.
Before her each with clamor pleads the Laws,
Explained the matter, and would win the cause.
Dame Justice weighing long the doubtful Right,
Takes, opens, swallows it, before their sight.
The cause of strife remov’d so rarely well,
“There take” (says Justice), “take ye each a shell
We thrive at Westminster on Fools like you:
‘Twas a fat oyster — live in peace — Adieu.”
Campus climate roundup
- Prof. Laura Kipnis, previously investigated by Northwestern over an essay she wrote saying there are too many Title IX investigations, wrote a book about the experience and that touched off yet another Title IX investigation of her [Jeannie Suk Gersen, The New Yorker]
- Groups demand that outspoken social conservative Prof. Amy Wax not be allowed to teach first-year civil procedure at University of Pennsylvania Law School [Caron/TaxProf] How to evaluate claims that professors who say controversial things must step away from the classroom because they can’t be trusted to treat/grade students fairly? [Eugene Volokh]
- Meanwhile, co-author of “bourgeois culture” op-ed, Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego, finds his dean distinctly unsupportive [Tom Smith, Caron/TaxProf roundup and more]
- “Stay Woke” and allyship: insider view of American University’s new required first-year diversity courses [Minding the Campus] So revealing that an AAUW chapter would celebrate cancellation of this American U event [Elizabeth Nolan Brown]
- Anonymous denunciation makes things better: president of Wright State University in Ohio “is encouraging students to anonymously report any violence and hate speech that might occur on campus.” [AP/WOUB] Student protesters called on Evergreen State “to target STEM faculty in particular for ‘antibias’ training” [Heather Heying, WSJ]
- From this excerpt, upcoming Shep Melnick book on Title IX, OCR and federal control of colleges sounds top-notch [Law and Liberty] What to expect as Education Department reconsiders its former Dear Colleague policies [KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Weekly Standard]
Waivers of class actions against employers
The Supreme Court will resolve a circuit court split on whether employment agreements under which workers agree to “arbitrate disputes with their employers individually, rather than bringing class-action lawsuits collectively with their co-workers, are valid….In an unusual twist, the administration will face off against an independent agency of the federal government, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).” [Lawrence Hurley and Robert Iafolla, Reuters, earlier here, here, here, and arbitration generally] Monday was oral argument on the trio of Murphy Oil, Ernst & Young, and Epic Systems [Amy Howe, transcript]