Labor & Employment Law – Page 21 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Pickering Free Speech Rights and Cyberbullying by Public Employees

Post author:Paul M. Secunda
Post published:September 30, 2010
Post category:First Amendment Labor & Employment Law

I can’t make this stuff up. From CNN and Anderson Cooper (with video):

For nearly six months, Andrew Shirvell, an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan, has waged an Internet campaign against college student Chris Armstrong, the openly gay student assembly president at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Using the online moniker “Concerned Michigan Alumnus,” Shirvell launched his blog in late April.

“Welcome to ‘Chris Armstrong Watch,'” Shirvell wrote in his inaugural blog post.

Craigslist “Adult Services” Proponent Fired by School District

Post author:Paul M. Secunda
Post published:September 27, 2010
Post category:Education & Law Labor & Employment Law

Interesting education and employment law story in the New York Times brought to my attention by one of my employment law students:

A teacher at a Bronx elementary school has been reassigned after writing on a Web site about her past as a sex worker.

In a short online article in The Huffington Post on Sept. 7, the teacher, Melissa Petro, criticized Craigslist for shutting down its “adult services” section, which carried sex-related advertising.

Ms. Petro wrote that from October 2006 to January 2007, she “accepted money in exchange for sexual services I provided to men I met online.”

She said that she used Craigslist to meet men and it provided “a simple, familiar forum through which I could do my business with complete anonymity, from the safety and convenience of my own home.”

This is a fairly standard public employee free speech case applying the Pickering framework, probably coming down to whether the online article in question substantially disrupted the teacher’s ability to be an effective teacher in the school (by dint of her relationship with her supervisors, colleagues, parents, or students). When you are talking about elementary school, you also have to consider concerns about good role models and the impressionable age of the children.

District Court Keeps Out Social Framework Evidence in Employment Discrimination Case

Post author:Paul M. Secunda
Post published:September 27, 2010
Post category:Evidence Labor & Employment Law

Thanks to Colin Miller over at the Evidence Prof Blog who has an interesting post up today at Feminist Law Professors about an evidence issue near and dear to my heart in a recent employment gender discrimination class action, E.E.O.C. v. Bloomberg L.P., 2010 WL 3466370 (S.D.N.Y. 2010) (can’t find a non-pay version, sorry). The case involved allegations by the EEOC that the company had engaged in multiple forms of pregnancy and sex discrimination against 58 female employees.

At issue specifically was whether the court should allow in so-called “social framework evidence.” As Melissa Hart and I described in our recent article, A Matter of Context: Social Framework Evidence in Employment Discrimination Class Actions, 78 FORDHAM L. REV. 37, 39 (2009), such evidence involves using general research results to construct a frame of reference or background context for deciding factual issues crucial to the resolution of a specific case. More specifically, in employment discrimination cases, we wrote: “Social framework evidence, offered by qualified social scientists, plays a central role in modern employment discrimination litigation. By offering insight into the operation of stereotyping and bias in decision making, social framework experts can help fact finders to assess other evidence more accurately.”