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

Particular Humanities: A Lesson Before Dying, A Long Walk to Freedom, and The Wire

Particular Humanities: A Lesson Before Dying, A Long Walk to Freedom, and The Wire

This is a vintage Murray post in that I take the Question of the Month (favorite book or movie about the law) and, as I like to say, “tweak it” (and, as Michael likes to say, “ignore it”).  I am selecting two books, Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying and Nelson Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom, and one television series, The Wire.  I choose them because each examines what I consider a key question: how individuals maintain their humanity as they negotiate potentially unjust legal systems.

A Lesson Before Dying taught me that lawyers have to be advocates for their clients’ humanity.  

Continue ReadingParticular Humanities: A Lesson Before Dying, A Long Walk to Freedom, and The Wire