Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Johannes Ungerer, ‘Legislatively liquidated damages (legiliquids)’
INTRODUCTION In a case of breach of contract, courts commonly award damages to the claimant as compensation for the actual loss caused by the defendant. Yet it can be difficult for the individual claimant to quantify and prove the exact compensatory amount. Occasionally, private parties therefore agree upfront on a contractual clause stipulating liquidated damages […]
Wendy Elizabeth Bonython, ‘Moral Injury: An Emerging Aspect of the Employer’s Duty of Care to Employees?’
ABSTRACT Moral injury is a discrete form of harm affecting individuals as a potentially avoidable consequence of exposure to a morally injurious event. That injury (independent of psychological injury or illness) has been identified as a cause of physical symptoms, suicide and suicidality. Originally identified within military and veteran cohorts, it is observable in emergency […]
Bishara and Luisetto, ‘Goodbye, Noncompetes? Why Now and Policy Convergence’
ABSTRACT Post-employment non-competition agreements (‘noncompetes’) have been part of the common law dating back to at least 1414. The past 15 years have seen an unprecedented wave of scrutiny that is mostly aimed at curtailing these agreements, culminating in the contentious 2024 Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) attempted noncompete ban. With the broad FTC ban on […]
David Owens, ‘Authority and Agreement: The Case of Employment’
ABSTRACT Employers exercise directive authority over their employees; they can issue binding orders and enforce those orders by way of various administrative sanctions. It is generally agreed that this authority is legitimate only when the employee has consented to employment but it turns that vindicating this idea requires a careful analysis both of the kind […]
Sari Mazzurco, ‘Source and Solidarity’
ABSTRACT Trademark law has become the new frontier of union-busting. Companies like Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and Medieval Times have brought unprecedented suits against their employee unions for trademark infringement in relation to their organizing activities. This sort of litigation puts courts in the difficult position of reconciling trademark protections with unionization rights. Their attempts to […]
Norhan Moussa, ‘The Applicable Law to International Employment Contracts: A Private International Law Perspective’
ABSTRACT The globalization of labor markets has brought unprecedented challenges in determining the applicable law to international employment contracts. As cross-border employment relationships grow, conflicts of law issues arise, particularly concerning the choice of law and the protection of employees’ rights. This research examines the main principles governing the applicable law to international employment contracts, […]
‘Two Frameworks for Employee Data Empowerment’
Veena Dubal, ‘Data Laws at Work’, 134 Yale Law Journal Forum 405 (2025); Ifeoma Ajunwa, ‘AI and Captured Capital’, 134 Yale Law Journal Forum 372 (2025). The Yale Law Journal Forum recently hosted a collection of essays under the rubric of ‘Reimagining and Empowering the Contemporary Workforce’. Two of these works deal specifically with the […]
Jennifer Gant, ‘Floating Charges and Moral Hazard: Finding Fairness for Involuntary and Vulnerable Stakeholders’
ABSTRACT The floating charge as a concept undoubtedly affords a considerable amount of preference and control to the creditor who owns it and to the debtor which can continue to deal with the charged assets, and to potentially dissipate them in the normal course of business. Such power may overshadow any preferences and priorities available […]
Jordan English, ‘Rectification, Employment Contracts, and Collective Agreements’
INTRODUCTION One of the oddities of British labour law, especially when compared with its continental and common law cousins, is that collective agreements concluded as a result of the collective bargaining process between an employer and a trade union have no necessary legal effect whether vis-à-vis the employer and the union or vis-à-vis the employer […]
Matthew Bodie, ‘The Lawless Workplace’
ABSTRACT In their remarkable book Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit tell the stories of individual women who have seen their careers smashed and shattered at some of the most important US companies of the last fifty years. These stories – from employees […]