In O'Connor v. Uber, 2015 WL 5138097 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 1, 2015), a federal district court permitted a class-action case to proceed on the question of whether 160,000 drivers were misclassified by their employer as independent contractors rather than employees. The case has garnered widespread...

In litigation against ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft, former drivers have alleged that they were misclassified as independent contractors and denied employment benefits. The companies have countered that they do not employ drivers and merely license access to a platform that matches those...

Membership in traditional unions has steeply declined over the past two decades. As the White House and Congress are now completely Republican controlled, there promises to be no reversal of this trend in the near future. In the face of this rejection of traditional bargaining efforts, several...

The technology sector has created thousands of new jobs for workers across the country in an emerging multi-billion dollar industry. Many companies in this platform-based sector are attempting to characterize their workers as independent contractors rather than employees, thus stripping them of...

In 2011, in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court refused to certify a proposed class of one and a half million female workers who had alleged that the nation's largest private employer had discriminated against them on the basis of their sex. The academic response to the case has...

The Supreme Court has failed to provide any substantive guidance on when punitive damages are appropriate in employment discrimination cases since it issued its seminal decision in Kolstad v. American Dental Ass’n over twelve years ago. The Court has recently expanded its punitive damages...

Punitive damages were described by one early court as "an unsightly and an unhealthy excrescense." While the views toward punitive relief have changed over the years, the debate over the availability of exemplary damages in the judicial system has remained controversial. No place is that...

In Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2531 (2011), the Supreme Court held that a proposed class of over a million women that had alleged pay and promotion discrimination against the nation’s largest retailer could not be certified. According to the Court, the plaintiffs had failed to...