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Posts from the ‘General Essays’ Category

FCC v. AT&T: The Idolatry of Corporations and Impersonal Privacy

Personal privacy is a core right of citizens of modern limited democracies. It might seem, then, that extending this right to corporations would extend our freedom. That conclusion would be wrong. In fact, extending privacy rights to our large bureaucracies—whether corporate or governmental—turns the right on its head.

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The Anti-Subordination Principle of Labor and Employment Law Preemption

The employee-protective purpose of most federal labor and employment stat­utes should restrain courts from deciding that federal law preempts local laws granting greater protection to individual workers than does federal law.

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Discounting Discrimination

We don’t need more or tougher civil rights laws; we need better and smarter civil rights laws that can attack the subtler and less blatant bias of today, in jobs where decision making is decentralized and job criteria are fuzzy and subjective.

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Supporting Workers by Accounting for Care

Two pathologies in contemporary antipoverty policy—inadequate child-care assistance and failure to value parental caregiving as work—are flip sides of one coin.

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Politics and the Federal Appointments Process

The main problem with the current appointments climate is that the President and the Senate are not being confrontational and combative enough.

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Class Actions at the Crossroads

The Supreme Court has recently decided to hear argument in the largest private-employer civil rights case in American history, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. . . .

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Expecting the Unreasonable

Persons with disabilities can pose complex challenges to law enforcement officers charged with keeping the peace.

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Bringing Change to Credit Cards

Spurred to action by crisis in global credit markets, the United States Congress passed the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (“Credit CARD Act”). In the Credit CARD Act, Congress turned away from more than thirty years of primarily disclosure-only regulation of credit cards.

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Reading the State School Finance Litigation Tea Leaves

Ever since the Supreme Court held in San Antonio v. Rodriguez that education is not a fundamental right protected under the United States Constitution, legal efforts to advance the educational plight of disadvantaged school children have taken to state courts, where a new legal theory is emerging.

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The Constitutional Option

by SENATOR TOM UDALL
The United States Senate has become a graveyard for good ideas—increasingly crippled by the partisan abuse of the institution’s own rules.

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