Congratulations to the Marquette Law Mock Trial Team

Congratulations to the Marquette Law Mock Trial Team who competed at the ABA Section of Labor and Employment Trial Advocacy Competition on November 3, 2018.

The team advanced to the Semi-final round of the competition, placing within the top four teams.  Team members include Cole Altman, Katie Dvorak, Dan McCrackin, and Rohit Rangarajan.  The team was coached by Katie Halopka-Ivery and Emil Ovbiagele.

Congratulations, Team!  We are proud of your hard work and success.

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Right-to-Work or Right-to-Free Ride?

This semester in Professor Lisa Mazzie’s Advanced Legal Writing: Writing for Law Practice seminar, students are required to write one blog post on a law- or law school-related topic of their choice. Writing blog posts as a lawyer is a great way to practice writing skills, and to do so in a way that allows the writer a little more freedom to showcase his or her own voice, and—eventually for these students—a great way to maintain visibility as a legal professional. Here is one of those blog posts, this one written by 3L Frank Capria.

Labor and employment law is an area of law that is of high importance. However, it gets little coverage or recognition. It does not get the publicity like criminal law does in hit TV shows like “Better Call Saul.” But, the Supreme Court is about to decide Janus v. AFSCME, which could dramatically change the entire public sector and make it right-to-work. This case will have a serious impact on teachers, firemen, police officers, and other public employee union members. If the Supreme Court rules mandatory collection of agency fees is unconstitutional, public sector unions will be weakened.

Policy

Right-to-work is a policy that allows dissenting union members to not pay non-political dues, or agency fees, to unions. Because of the exclusivity provision in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), unions must still represent these dissenting members when negotiating the collective bargaining agreement or when the member is in an arbitration proceeding. The NLRA permits states to have right-to-work laws.

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Equal Pay Day, Rhetoric, and Reality

Image by: Pictures of Money, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Today was Equal Pay Day, the date that indicates how much longer a woman had to work to earn what a man earned in the previous year. More than 20 years ago, the National Committee on Pay Equity started selecting one day a year—always a Tuesday in April—to highlight the continued disparity between men’s and women’s wages.

Now, you can quibble with me about the precise numbers or you can try to explain to me that there isn’t really a gender gap (both of which have been done and probably will be done again); however, as the Pew Research Center noted last summer, though some groups of women have narrowed the gap, there in fact remains some gap in wages between white men and all groups of women.

Much of that gap in wages can be explained by differing levels of education, workforce experience, or occupation. But even when you control for all of those more concrete and measurable variables, there remains an unexplained gap that may—may not—have to do with gender discrimination.

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