Democratic and Republican lawmakers have come together for the second time this year in an effort to increase transparency for incidents of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. On September 15, 2022, the Senate Judiciary Committee, acting on a bipartisan basis, unanimously voted to advance the Speak Out Act...
I was on my way down to New Orleans for Realscreen Summit 2020 when the woman in front of me announced to the plane that Kobe Bryant was dead. By the time we landed, the rumor was confirmed and the breaking news splashed across every smartphone in sight. In this...
The Federal Correctional Institute in Memphis, Tennessee, (“FCI-Memphis”) is one of 122 prisons run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The inmates at FCI-Memphis are all males, but the institution has 49 female employees. Due to a chronic shortage of correctional officers, FCI-Memphis regularly “augments” (i.e. requires) females to...
In Morgan v. Sundance, Inc., No. 21-328, 2022 WL 1611788 (U.S. May 23, 2022), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts, in analyzing a claim that a party has waived the right to arbitrate a dispute under the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), should not impose a requirement of prejudice....
Friends and acquaintances who are not lawyers (and even some who are) have expressed curiosity and confusion about the recent well-publicized decision by Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York to dismiss the defamation lawsuit brought by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin against the New York Times....
In a 6-3 decision issued January 13, 2022, the Supreme Court cast significant doubt on the viability of a pillar of President Biden’s plan to fight to the spread of Covid-19. The Court’s majority held that challengers were likely to succeed on their claim that the Occupational Safety and Health...
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s executive orders, commencing at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively froze statutory and court imposed deadlines for all manner of legal proceedings. For civil proceedings, at least, that stoppage lasted through Nov. 3, 2020. In the months since, a few courts have had a chance to...
A timely new article entitled “The state of the campaign to end mandatory arbitration of sexual misconduct claims in employment agreements” written by RPJ Partner Mark H. Moore was recently published by Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw Today. In this in-depth piece, Mark discusses the growing practice of employers of requiring arbitration...
While the policy impetus behind the confidentiality prohibition—preventing employers from silencing complaints about harassment and discrimination—may be worthy, the reality is that employers will normally not settle without a confidentiality provision. In what seems like much simpler times, parties to New York employment disputes, including disputes involving claims of discrimination...
Partner Mark Moore was recently quoted in a comprehensive overview of the legal challenges facing colleges and universities published on January 22 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The New Risk Management” and authored by Alexander C. Kafka. In addressing post-pandemic litigation over tuition refunds, Mark stated: “Because many...