Wisconsin Court of Appeals Decides Important Video Privacy Case

Over on Concurring Opinions, Dan Solove reports on a recent Wisconsin Court of Appeals case involving Wisconsin’s video voyeurism law, Wis. Stat. § 942.09(2)(am). The case is State v. Jahnke, 2007AP2130-CR (Dec. 30, 2008). Wisconsin is one of a number of states that have adopted such statutes, which generally bar videotaping someone without their consent who is in a situation in which they have a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Wisconsin’s version makes a violation a Class I felony.

Dan comments on the heartening aspect of the opinion, which is that it avoids the “trap” of assuming that privacy is all or nothing. In Jahnke, the defendant recorded his then-girlfriend as they were having sex without her permission. She obviously consented to being viewed naked by the defendant, but did not consent to it being recorded. The issue before the court was whether the girlfriend had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” under the statute.

The majority said yes, and Dan cogently explains why that’s a good outcome as a policy matter. But of course, judges don’t usually get to make policy decisions, they make interpretation decisions, and their power to interpret is cabined by all sorts of rules. That’s where the dissent, authored by Judge Charles P. Dykman, veers off from the majority opinion.

Continue ReadingWisconsin Court of Appeals Decides Important Video Privacy Case

Can High Medical Bills Cost You Your Job?

In an article in today’s Chicago Tribune, our colleague Paul Secunda suggests that the risks of this happening are higher in the current economic climate.  The article concerns a federal lawsuit in which the plaintiff alleges she was fired because of her husband’s medical bills, which were covered through her employer’s medical plan.  The Seventh Circuit recently reversed the trial court’s dismissal of her claim.  Federal law, of course, generally prohibits employment actions that discriminate on the basis of disability, which may provide a legal foundation for some claims like those of the plaintiff in the Seventh Circuit case.

Continue ReadingCan High Medical Bills Cost You Your Job?

Ruan on the Accommodation of Religious Speech in the Workplace

In the fall issue of the Marquette Law Review, Professor Nantiya Ruan of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law has written an interesting article entitled “Accommodating Respectful Religious Expression in the Workplace.”  It is always hard to summarize a serious piece of scholarship in the few sentences that a blog post will permit and I am, of course, likely to emphasize those aspects of the piece that I found intriguing. It is also true, since I have decided to post a response and not a blurb, that I will emphasize those things that I see differently. So, with advance apologies to Professor Ruan, here is how I read the article.

Ruan posits an inconsistency between the emerging willingness of the Supreme Court to protect religious expression in public spaces (as illustrated by the Ten Commandments cases of 2005) and its rather narrow reading of the requirements to accommodate religious expression in the workplace under Title VII, where employers need incur no more than a de minimis burden to accommodate religious expression and practice.

I am sympathetic to Ruan’s arguments for greater accommodation of religious expression in the workplace. She does a nice job of advancing the notion that religion is fundamental to individual identity, although I would have added, as I have in recent papers, the notion that mandated secular spaces harm religion.

But I want to comment on her claim of an inconsistency between the recent trend toward toleration of religion in the public square and the treatment of religion in the workplace.

Continue ReadingRuan on the Accommodation of Religious Speech in the Workplace