Authoruclalaw

Just Notice: Re-Reforming Employment at Will

This Article proposes a fundamental shift in the movement to reform employment termination law. For forty years, there has been a near consensus among employee advocates and worklaw scholars that the current doctrine of employment at will should be abandoned in favor of a rule requiring just cause for termination. This Article contends that such calls are misguided, not—as defenders of the...

Reading Ricci: Whitening Discrimination, Racing Test Fairness

This Article posits that the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano does not evaluate all claims of discrimination on a level playing field but rather “whitens” discrimination and “races” test fairness. The authors explicate how Ricci whitens discrimination by reframing antidiscrimination law’s presumptions and burdens to focus on disparate treatment of whites as the paradigmatic and...

Shareholder Campaign Funds: A Campaign Subsidy Scheme for Corporate Elections

In the vivid imagination of Delaware courts, the shareholder franchise is “the ideological underpinning” upon which corporate power rests. A corporate election to choose who should lead the firm is corporate democracy at work since such elections give shareholders the power “to turn the board out.” However, in reality, the vast majority of corporate elections are ho-hum affairs. The current board...

Setting National Coverage Standards for Health Plans Under Healthcare Reform

On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (Affordable Care Act), the most far-reaching healthcare reform legislation since the establishment of the Medicare program in 1965. The Affordable Care Act directs the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish a minimum level of health benefits, called the essential health...

Secrets Worth Keeping: Toward a Principled Basis for Stigmatized Property Disclosure Statutes

Since the late 1980s, a majority of states have enacted statutes protecting nondisclosure of stigmas affecting property in residential real estate transactions. While many of these statutes have elements in common, there are substantial differences with respect to the set of stigmas covered, the duty to answer direct inquiries concerning particular stigmas, the relevance of time elapsed since the...

Raping Like a State

It is a remarkable fact that rhetorically the state is gendered male, while state-on-state violence is continually represented as sexual violence. This Article applies the insights of queer theory to examine this rhetoric of sexual violation. More specifically, it analyzes the injury of colonialism as a kind of homoerotic violation of non-Western states’ (would-be) sovereignty. It does so by...

Sexual and Gender Variation in American Public Law: From Malignant to Benign to Productive

Sexuality, gender, and the law now constitutes an important field of legal inquiry and scholarship. This Article traces the evolution of the “big idea” in this area: Contrary to natural law assumptions, the nation is moving decisively toward the norm that sexual and gender variation are typically benign and not malignant. Today, this liberal norm is hotly contested by both traditionalists who...

Sticky Intuitions and the Future of Sexual Orientation Discrimination

As once-accepted empirical justifications for discriminating against lesbians and gay men have fallen away, the major stumbling block to equality lies in a set of intuitions, impulses, and so-called common sense views regarding sexual orientation and gender. This Article takes up these impulses and views, which I characterize as “sticky intuitions,” to consider both their sustained influence and...