Ralph Huiras, Hail and Farewell

Ralph HuirasThe area on the second floor of Eckstein Hall, running west to east from the elevators to the dean’s office, is the Huiras Lounge. It honors the extraordinary support that Ralph J. Huiras, L’41, gave to the building project — indeed, even though he made substantial gifts within the past decade to improve Sensenbrenner Hall, Ralph was, along with University Architect Tom Ganey, the earliest proponent of an entirely new home for Marquette Law School. Ralph felt especially strongly concerning the school, perhaps because it was his father’s alma mater as well: Peter M. Huiras graduated from Marquette’s law school in 1918, the same week that Ralph was born. The Huiras Lounge thus perpetuates Peter Huiras’s memory as well. There is much more that could be said concerning Ralph, who passed away this past weekend. Some of it has been said on past occasions, such as in this cover story of the law magazine several years ago or on the occasion of Ralph’s receipt of the Law Alumni Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Beyond this, I wish to note, for the benefit of our students, how proud Ralph was of the Huiras Lounge. He forwent the opportunity to have the fourth-floor gallery bear the Huiras name, instead of the lounge. Ralph wanted his and his father’s memory to be both near the dean’s office (recalling his visit to Dean Francis X. Swietlik’s office in 1941 when he had been summoned to Washington, D.C. to join the FBI even before he could take his last exams) and — more importantly — where the students are and will be. It was a great privilege to know Ralph, to stand in the Huiras Lounge with him last month, and to be associated with his belief in and commitment to the future of Marquette University Law School.

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Craigslist “Adult Services” Proponent Fired by School District

Sch_building 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.

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District Court Keeps Out Social Framework Evidence in Employment Discrimination Case

Scales-red 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.”

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