Posts tagged 'Supreme Court'

Faced with a challenge by 20 attorneys general in a federal court in Texas, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is going to trial with no defense from the Trump administration's Department of Justice (DOJ). The case rests on the constitutionality -- or unconstitutionality -- of the health care act now that the individual mandate has been withdrawn as a penalty for those lacking insurance. The a...

The U.S. Supreme Court has given the nation's second largest employer a sweeping victory by ruling that a multi-billion-dollar class action discrimination lawsuit cannot proceed because it lacks "convincing proof of a companywide discrimination pay and promotion policy." The suit against Wal-Mart was cobbled together to represent 1.5 million female and minority employees, all clai...

The United States Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments in the long-simmering Wal-Mart sex discrimination lawsuit tomorrow morning (March 29, 2011). The nine justices will weigh whether the class action certification in the case of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Dukes is justified under federal rules. Wal-Mart is arguing that monetary relief, as opposed to injunctive relief, is not available unde...

"Cat's paw" is a legal term referring to someone's influencing another person to do something (illegal, obviously) and thus potentially becoming liable as well. For instance in work-related circumstances, if a department manager has it in for a certain employee and the employee is then fired by his or her direct supervisor for performance reasons, can the terminated employee s...

In Thompson v. North American Stainless, decided yesterday (Jan. 24, 2011), the U.S. Supreme Court extended Civil Rights Act Title VII protection against retaliation to the fiancé of someone who had filed an EEOC complaint against the same company. Eric Thompson, who worked at North American, was fired after his fiancée lodged a complaint with the Equal Employment Opport...

No stranger to labor disputes or the courtroom, Wal-Mart has now been hit with a class-action gender bias lawsuit affecting as many as 1.5 million female employees. In a close ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco voted 6 to 5 to certify class-action status. Wal-Mart immediately said it would appeal to the Supreme Court. The lawsuit was originally filed in June 2001, and i...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has codified the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into its Compliance Manual, incorporating the law's standard that the statute of limitation on discriminatory pay practices resets each time a paycheck is issued, regardless of when the initial discriminatory pay decision was made. The 2009 Fair Pay Act, to recount, overturned the 2007 Supreme Court...

No doubt emblematic of his entire time in office, President Barack Obama will sign his first piece of legislation today--a labor law that overturns a Bush-era Supreme Court decision. Lilly Ledbetter, who was the subject of that Supreme Court ruling, will be there when Obama inks the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law. The legislation reverses the court's decision in the Ledbetter case that...

I'm not sure how the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which zoomed through the Senate last night and is now on its way to the House for reconciliation, will benefit the law's namesake, but it sure must be sweet to pull one over the head of Supreme Court justices. Five of the latter ruled in 2007 that Ms. Ledbetter's claim for pay discrimination against Goodyear, though just, was filed beyond the s...