Copyright (c) 2010 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner Recent documents in Joseph A. Seiner en-us Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:56:30 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner/5 http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner/5 Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:27:36 PDT A significant failure. That is how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been described by legal scholars and disability advocates alike. The statute, which was widely expected to help prevent disability discrimination in employment, has not fully achieved its intended purpose because of the ADA’s narrow interpretation in the courts. Congress recently sought to restore the employment protections of the ADA by amending the statute. Interpreting the complex and comprehensive amendments to the ADA will be a difficult task for the federal courts, which struggled to consistently apply even the original statutory terms. Complicating matters further, the proper pleading standard for disability claims was left in disarray after the Supreme Court’s decision in Twombly v. Bell Atlantic Corp., 127 S. Ct. 1955 (2007), which altered fifty years of federal pleading precedent. The courts have widely applied Bell Atlantic—a complex antitrust case—to the disability context, but have done so in an inconsistent manner. The amendments to the ADA, combined with Bell Atlantic, have created a significant amount of confusion in pleading disability claims. And, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009), only adds to this confusion. This Article performs an analysis of several hundred federal district court opinions, examining the impact of the Bell Atlantic decision on ADA claims. Attempting to provide clarity to disability pleading, this Article proposes a unified analytical framework for alleging disability discrimination, which satisfies the recent Supreme Court case law, the amendments to the ADA, and the federal rules. The analytical framework proposed by this Article would streamline the pleading process for disability claims, and provide a blueprint for litigants and courts in analyzing ADA cases. The paper concludes by exploring the possible implications of adopting the proposed model. Joseph A. Seiner Employment Discrimination Discrimination http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner/4 http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner/4 Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:23:35 PDT Punitive damages were described by one early court as “an unsightly and unhealthy excrescense.” Although 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 controversy more aptly demonstrated than in employment discrimination law, where punitive damages first became available in an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after a bitter congressional debate. Almost a decade ago, in Kolstad v. American Dental Association, the Supreme Court provided guidance on how punitive damages should be applied in discrimination cases brought pursuant to Title VII. Kolstad has only generated more confusion concerning the proper standard for exemplary relief, and recent district and appellate court decisions reflect this uncertainty.Attempting to determine the impact of punitive damages in Title VII cases after Kolstad, I performed an empirical analysis of all federal district court decisions during the calendar years of 2004 and 2005. The study closely examined over six hundred district court opinions issued during this timeframe. Of these cases, there were only twenty-four district court decisions either awarding punitive damages under Title VII or upholding a jury’s award of punitive relief. An additional study further revealed that slightly less than 18 percent of those Title VII cases that went to a jury resulted in a punitive damage award by the jury, and aproximately 29 percent of those juries that found in favor of the plaintiff also awarded punitive damages. This Article explores the basic foundations of punitive damages in the American judicial system, and examines the goals of providing this form of relief in employment discrimination cases. The Article further examines a study performed on the effectiveness of punitive damages in Title VII cases. After analyzing this data, this Article suggests one alternative way of better achieving the original deterrent purpose behind the addition of punitive damages to Title VII. The Article proposes a three-part framework for analyzing all cases of intentional discrimination and recommends adopting a new scheme for remedial relief under Title VII. The Article then explores the new implications of adopting the proposed approach and examines how the proposal fits within the contours of the academic scholarship. The Article concludes by urging that the congressional intent of deterring unlawful discrimination can more properly be achieved through the proposed form of the relief. Joseph A. Seiner http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner/3 http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner/3 Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:58:17 PST The legal framework for alleging disparate impact and disparate treatment claims in cases involving discriminatory employment standards has long been confused. The uncertainty of how to proceed in these cases has created analytical problems for both the federal courts and the litigants. There is a fine line between intentional and unintentional discrimination claims when it comes to employment standards, and that line is often blurred. A uniform approach for analyzing these cases is therefore needed. This article looks to the Canadian approach of analyzing discrimination claims in the employment standards context, and, borrowing from that model, proposes a three-part analytical framework for evaluating these types of claims in the U.S. The article then explores the implications of adopting this proposed approach, and applies the test to a federal appellate court decision on the issue. The article further explains how the model could be adopted without disturbing the current statutory structure. Joseph A. Seiner Employment Discrimination http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner/1 http://works.bepress.com/joseph_seiner/1 Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:39:22 PDT Amorphous. This is how the Supreme Court’s recent pleading paradigm has been appropriately described. In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, the Supreme Court abandoned the well-known pleading standard it had adopted fifty years earlier in Conley v. Gibson that a complaint should be dismissed only where there is no set of facts that could entitle the plaintiff to relief. In its place, the Court adopted a new rule that the pleadings must set forth sufficient facts to state a plausible claim. Though Twombly arose in the context of an antitrust case, its holding has already been extended by the lower courts to other areas of the law. The extent to which Twombly creates a new pleading standard for employment discrimination plaintiffs is unclear, and there is already disagreement among the judiciary over this question. If applied rigidly, Twombly threatens to raise the bar for civil rights litigants seeking to plead their claims. This Article attempts to determine how strictly the courts have been applying Twombly to employment discrimination plaintiffs by examining the dismissal rates of employment discrimination cases in the year before and the year following Twombly. The results revealed a higher percentage of decisions that granted a motion to dismiss in the employment context when the courts cited the new Supreme Court decision. Through individual examination of these cases, this Article argues that the courts should be more cautious when using the plausibility standard to dismiss discrimination claims early in the proceedings. To help resolve the current confusion in this area of the law, this Article proposes a new pleading framework for all employment discrimination cases, which complies with the recent plausibility standard set forth by the Supreme Court. The unified model proposed by this Article would bring more certainty to the pleading process and assist the courts and litigants in assessing the sufficiency of employment claims. This Article concludes by explaining how the proposed pleading framework comports with the legal scholarship following the Twombly decision. Joseph A. Seiner