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

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.”

Marquette Law Review Symposium – Promoting Employee Voice in the New American Economy

Post author:Paul M. Secunda
Post published:September 15, 2010
Post category:Labor & Employment Law Marquette Law School Speakers at Marquette

The Marquette Law Review Symposium this year will be on a labor and employment law topic. I had the pleasure of organizing the symposium as part of Marquette’s Labor and Employment Law Program. The event will be on Friday, October 1, 2010 from 8:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the beautiful new Eckstein Hall Law School building at 1215 Michigan Ave., Milwaukee.

The name of the program is: Promoting Employee Voice in the New American Economy and features, among other prominent speakers, Professor Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, the Willard and Margaret Carl Professor of Labor and Employment Law at Indiana University–Bloomington, Maurer School of Law.

All are welcome. There is no fee for this conference, but registration is required. Please reserve your spot by September 23, 2010 by filling out and sending in this this form.