U.S. Supreme Court – Page 13 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Revisiting the Treatment of Unpaid Internships Under the Fair Labor Standards Act

Post author:Christopher Guthrie
Post published:September 29, 2015
Post category:Labor & Employment Law Public U.S. Supreme Court

The extent to which the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) applies to internships and other similar training programs was one of the cutting edge legal issues argued during last spring’s Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition. In the months since the Jenkins Competition concluded, both the Second Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit have issued rulings that clarify the legal issues addressed in the Jenkins Competition. The treatment of interns under the Fair Labor Standards Act is once again making news.

The fictitious respondent in the Jenkins Competition was a law student who participated in an unpaid internship at a large, for-profit law firm. As part of this program, the student primarily worked on pro bono matters under the supervision of a senior attorney. The student was also able to participate in a mock trial and attend weekly training lunches. However, the student also volunteered to work on a number of projects that were not attached to any pro bono cases or training. They were more of an administrative or secretarial nature. After an unceremonious dismissal from the program (which was the basis for another claim in the case), the law student brought a suit against the firm, claiming that she was owed compensation for the work she did under her summer internship program because she qualified as an employee under the FLSA. The law firm, as one would expect, challenged this assertion, claiming that the student fell under the “trainee” exception carved out by the Supreme Court in Walling v. Portland Terminal Co. (1947).

The Court in Walling clearly meant to provide an opportunity for individuals to be trained without pay by a for-profit business in an industry the individual hoped to enter later. In its ruling, the Court ruled that the FLSA’s definition of an employee as someone who is “suffer[ed] or permit[ed] to work” was “obviously not intended to stamp all [working] persons as employees.” The Court saw the benefit of internship programs for both those seeking to be trained as well as the businesses seeking to develop their future workforce; classifying all such individuals as employees under the FLSA, and thus requiring payment, would limit training opportunities and hurt both groups. The problem with the Court’s ruling in Walling is that it did not establish a clear test for determining whether an individual is an intern or whether she is an employee covered by the protections in the FLSA.

The Problem with Justice Thomas’s Dignity Argument

Post author:Anna High
Post published:July 2, 2015
Post category:Constitutional Law Judges & Judicial Process Public U.S. Supreme Court

Justice Thomas, in his fervent dissent to the Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate same-sex marriage bans, has some interesting things to say about the concept of dignity. His view of human dignity is that it is innate and therefore inalienable: “Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them.”

The punchline, of course, is that the majority’s reasoning, which relies heavily on a Constitutional reading that sees dignity at the heart of liberty and the Due Process Clause, is flawed – gays and lesbians are not deprived of dignity (and therefore liberty) by their inability to marry, because “the government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.” Essentially, Justice Thomas says, as long as the state leaves me alone, my liberty and dignity are intact.

Justice Thomas’s invocation of slavery and internment to illustrate his qualms about the dignity argument arguably undermines the moral force of his point. Moreover, it rests on a narrow and theoretical concept of dignity.

Rodriguez v. United States: Supreme Court Says No to Prolonged Traffic Stops

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 29, 2015
Post category:Constitutional Law Criminal Law & Process Public U.S. Supreme Court

Last week, the Supreme Court decided City of Los Angeles v. Patel, the fourth and final of its search-and-seizure cases this term. In Patel, the Court overturned a city ordinance requiring hotel operators to share information about their guests with the police.

Patel confirmed this as a good term for Fourth Amendment rights, joining Grady v. North Carolina (GPS tracking of sex offender counted as search for Fourth-Amendment purposes) and Rodriguez v. United States (police improperly extended traffic stop to conduct dog sniff of car). Less favorable, though, was Heien v. North Carolina (no suppression of evidence obtained after traffic stop that was based on officer’s reasonable mistake of law).

The remainder of this post will focus on Rodriguez, which strikes me as the most interesting of the Fourth-Amendment series. Broadly speaking, at issue was the extent to which the police can go on a fishing expedition when they pull over a driver for a traffic violation.