Employment and Labor Law

ERISA’s civil enforcement provisions protect workers whose plan administrators mishandle their benefits. In many cases, a beneficiary’s only path to relief is through § 502(a)(3)’s authorization of “appropriate equitable relief”; yet the Supreme Court has not been clear about when monetary compensation is available under this provision, and circuit courts have split as a result. This Comment proposes a workable judicial framework to resolve the split: Courts should award equitable monetary compensation when a fiduciary causes harm with clearly identifiable financial value and the beneficiary lacks the sophistication to protect themselves through alternative means.

Anti-fat bias has been described as the last socially acceptable form of prejudice. Despite the discrimination that fat people face, there is no federal protection against weight discrimination. One potential solution to the lack of existing legal protections is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Claims challenging weight discrimination under the ADA argue that weight discrimination is a form of disability discrimination that is based on the medical condition of obesity. Yet, courts have resisted granting the ADA’s protections to obese plaintiffs.

This Comment argues that courts should recognize obesity as an ADA-protected disability, even in circuits that have restricted obesity-as-a-disability ADA claims to cases where a plaintiff can show that their obesity is related to a physiological disorder. The author draws parallels between obesity and gender dysphoria to highlight courts’ recent willingness to extend the ADA’s protection to highly stigmatized clinical conditions when a diagnosis has gained credibility in the medical community and evidence suggests that the condition has a physiological cause.

This Comment uses the case study of guns-at-work laws to understand Cedar Point v. Hassid’s per se takings rule as well as its exceptions. Enacted by about half of the States, guns-at-work laws protect the right of a business’s employees, customers, and invitees to store firearms in private vehicles even if those private vehicles are on company property (i.e. parking lots/parking structures). While these laws have long survived Takings Clause challenges, Cedar Point revived the viability of such challenges. Using the example of guns-at-work laws, the Comment seeks both to understand the scope of Cedar Point’s per se takings rule and to clarify and develop the open-to-the-public and long-standing restrictions on property rights exceptions to it.

On February 23, 2017, two titans of Silicon Valley went to war in federal court: Google filed a lawsuit against Uber, accusing it of using intellectual property allegedly stolen by one of the lead engineers on Waymo, Google’s self-driving automotive subsidiary. Specifically, Google alleged that Anthony Levandowski had misappropriated Google’s intellectual property before departing (along with other Google engineers) to found Otto, a self-driving car startup subsequently acquired by Uber for $680 million.

Often dismissed as a second-class agency with little power, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) actually plays a crucial role in antidiscrimination efforts and is tasked with enforcing every employment discrimination statute in the federal arsenal.