Boston Lawyer Blog

Employees Who Care for Elderly or Disabled Family Members Are Entitled to Protection from Discrimination

Published on: April 19, 2016 | by Emma Quinn-Judge

More than one in six American employees provides care or assistance for an elderly or disabled family member or friend. Caregiving responsibilities cut across socioeconomic and demographic groups, although women and low-income individuals still assume a disproportionate share of such responsibilities. One in seven Americans is currently age 65 or older, but that number is projected to increase to one in five Americans by 2040. As the population ages, the number of employees with caregiving responsibilities is only likely to grow.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recognizes that employees with caregiving responsibilities face discrimination in the workplace related to these responsibilities. For example, an employee may be prevented from taking leave to which she is entitled or punished when she exercises her right to such leave; an employee may be penalized for his association with a disabled employee; or an employee may be stereotyped as lazy or uncommitted to her job merely due to her caregiving responsibilities.

Are Universities’ Views of Sexual Harassment on a Collision Course with the First Amendment?

Published on: April 8, 2016 | by Naomi Shatz

As explained in Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk’s forthcoming article, The Sex Bureaucracy, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) guidance documents about Title IX have shaped college and university sexual harassment and sexual assault policies by threatening the withdrawal of federal funding if the schools do not adopt OCR’s recommendations. OCR has defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” but made clear that under Title IX schools only have an obligation to address such harassment when it rises to the level of creating a hostile environment, which it defines as harassment that “is sufficiently serious that it interferes with or limits a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s program.” This definition of sexual harassment provides the floor below which school’s policies may not fall, but nothing in Title IX or OCR guidance prevents schools from adopting even more expansive definitions of sexual harassment or standards under which they will investigate allegations of such harassment.

Recently, OCR has emphasized that it expects colleges and universities to investigate claims of sexual harassment well before they reach the threshold at which Title IX requires the school to address the harassment, i.e. before the harassment creates a hostile environment. CONTINUE READING ›

Massachusetts SJC’s Decision in Bulwer v. Mount Auburn Hospital Stops Erosion of Right to Jury Trial in Employment Cases

Published on: April 1, 2016 | by Ruth O'Meara-Costello

Among lawyers who represent employees in discrimination lawsuits, the most maligned rule of civil procedure is Rule 56, which governs summary judgment—a time-consuming, expensive, and frequently unfairly applied procedure in which judges decide cases on paper instead of allowing juries to hear the parties’ evidence. In Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court’s recent decision in Bulwer v. Mount Auburn Hospital should help to discourage employers from filing motions for summary judgment, and help plaintiffs to get their cases before a jury.

Motions for summary judgment ask the court to enter judgment for a party prior to trial and without allowing a jury to hear the evidence. Either side can make such a motion, and in cases where the parties agree on the basic facts, summary judgment can be a useful tool for resolving cases that turn purely on a question of law without expending resources on a full trial. In the practice of employment law, though, the employment defense bar devoted to protecting companies from discrimination claims has successfully perverted summary judgment into a tool for taking the ultimate contested issue of fact—whether the employer chose to fire or otherwise take action against the plaintiff because of his or her race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or age—away from the jury. Instead, employment defense lawyers ask judges to answer that question based on a paper record, depriving the plaintiff of the chance to tell his or her story. Judges, unfortunately, have been all too eager to accept the invitation to substitute their own judgment of the evidence for that of a jury, and summary judgment has become an important hurdle for many employment plaintiffs—one that can be difficult and costly to surmount.

So you’ve been accused of academic misconduct. Here’s what you need to know.

Published on: March 14, 2016 | by Naomi Shatz

If you or your child is accused of engaging in academic misconduct, you’ll get a crash course in how the college or university bureaucracy works to process these cases and sanction students. Before that happens, you should be aware of a few key points.

#1: Academic misconduct is a big category

In a previous post I explained how colleges define plagiarism, probably the most common form of academic misconduct. Colleges will sanction students for plagiarism if the student intentionally or accidentally copies, quotes without proper attribution, or incorporates language or ideas from some other person into their work. Colleges also deem it plagiarism if students work together on an assignment but do not list their co-collaborators on the work they turn in.

Research misconduct is another form of academic misconduct we frequently address. Research misconduct arises mostly in the hard sciences, and according to federal regulations is defined as “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.”

Like the Cosby Case, Massachusetts SJC Decision in Commonwealth v. Celester Illustrates When to Invoke the Fifth Amendment

Published on: March 7, 2016 | by Ruth O'Meara-Costello

In a new case, Commonwealth v. Celester, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court emphasizes how important it is for defendants to be informed of and advised regarding their right to remain silent, holding that it was ineffective for an attorney not to advise his client to invoke his Fifth Amendment right when questioned by police. The decision is legally significant in the scope that it gives to the right to effective advice of counsel, but it also illustrates what good criminal defense lawyers already know about the importance of the Fifth Amendment—a lesson that Bill Cosby would have benefited from when giving a deposition in 2005.

In most criminal cases, most defense lawyers advise their clients not to give statements to the police. This is common, often essential, advice that we give to the innocent as well as to the guilty; someone who will have to defend him or herself at trial is almost always better off not unnecessarily sharing information with prosecutors in advance. In criminal trials, the choices to invoke the Fifth Amendment and not answer questions from the police, or to remain silent at trial, cannot be held against a defendant, and so there is often little downside in taking the Fifth, particularly in interrogation by police.

Courts Are Starting to Permit Title IX Lawsuits by Accused Students to Go Forward

Published on: February 26, 2016 | by David Russcol

As we have covered before on this blog, courts have generally been inhospitable to Title IX claims by students accused of sexual misconduct on campus, often dismissing them in the early stages before the students have a chance to obtain evidence through discovery. The most common theory for a Title IX violation is the “erroneous outcome” theory outlined in Yusuf v. Vassar College: to state a claim under this theory, a student disciplined for sexual misconduct must make some showing that the disciplinary process was unfair, combined with “particular circumstances suggesting that gender bias was a motivating factor behind the erroneous finding.”

Unfortunately for plaintiffs, evidence of this sort of gender bias is frequently hard to come by. Even when there is a “smoking gun” document or email, it is often locked away within the university until and unless a court orders it revealed. (The Washington & Lee case, where the Title IX officer had expressed on a public website her view that a woman is sexually assaulted when she has sex and then regrets it, is a rare exception.) The requirement that a plaintiff come forward with particulars at the very beginning of the case fits awkwardly with the standard by which claims are judged when the school, almost invariably, files a motion to dismiss. Since 2007, and especially after the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, plaintiffs have had to make enough specific factual allegations at the beginning of a case to make their legal claims “plausible” in the eyes of the judge. I have discussed previously on the blog how this combination creates a Catch-22: an accused student usually cannot get access to critical evidence without discovery from the university, but the student’s lawsuit will get thrown out before discovery unless it identifies that evidence. Thus, by and large, the courthouse doors have been shut on this type of claim.

Proposed New Equal Pay Legislation Makes Needed Updates to the Massachusetts Equal Pay Act

Published on: February 16, 2016 | by Emma Quinn-Judge

Massachusetts is one step closer to a strengthened equal pay law after the State Senate passed equal pay legislation in late January. The bill, which now goes to the House of Representatives for review, seeks to address the continuing wage gap between men and women. Although Massachusetts adopted its first-in-the-nation equal pay act in 1945, women in Massachusetts still earn approximately 80 percent of what men earn. Women of color earn even less: African-American women earn 66 cents on the dollar, while Latina women earn 54 cents on the dollar compared to men. An analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research has concluded that Massachusetts will not close the pay gap until 2058.

The proposed new law seeks to accelerate the rate of change by making three key updates to the Massachusetts Equal Pay Act (“MEPA”). First, the legislation broadens the definition of “comparable work” by explaining that “comparable work” is any work that is “substantially similar” in content and requires “substantially similar” skill, effort, and responsibility, performed under similar working conditions. Moreover, employers cannot rely solely on job titles or descriptions to determine whether work is comparable. If adopted, this new definition would overrule the narrower “comparable work” definition created by the Supreme Judicial Court in two decisions issued in the mid-nineties in the same case, Jancey v. School Committee of Everett. Those decisions – the first to squarely interpret “comparable work” in the context of the state’s equal pay act – failed, as the dissenting justices noted in Jancey II, to look “beyond job labels” and perceptions of job differences “that are, in part at least, artifacts of sexual stereotyping and traditional job segregation by gender.” By moving away from the Jancey definitions, the new legislation permits a broader analysis of whether work is truly comparable.

Pop Quiz: Do you know what constitutes plagiarism at your college?

Published on: February 3, 2016 | by Naomi Shatz

As far as we know, every college and university in the country has a student handbook or honor code that provides rules for how students must perform their work and the standards they are expected to meet. And as far as we know, at every college and university students are routinely disciplined for violating those rules in a number of ways – from the most minor of infractions to severe academic misconduct. Colleges and universities place a significant amount of responsibility on their students to independently learn the school’s policies, the forms of citation they should use in each discipline, and the rules applicable to each class they take. Before turning in work at college, there are a few things to know about academic misconduct policies.

First and foremost, students and their parents need to understand how their school defines academic misconduct, and particularly, plagiarism. The vast majority of students we represent in academic discipline proceedings are accused of plagiarism, and many of our clients who did not intend to violate any rules or copy anyone else’s work nonetheless find themselves disciplined for violating school policies. In our experience most schools define plagiarism incredibly broadly. For example, Harvard College’s policy states: “Whenever ideas or facts are derived from a student’s reading and research or from a student’s own writings, the sources must be indicated . . . The responsibility for learning the proper forms of citation lies with the individual student . . . Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College.” Dartmouth College’s policy is similar: “Plagiarism is defined as the submission or presentation of work, in any form, that is not a student’s own, without acknowledgment of the source.” A few schools, however, define plagiarism more narrowly, as U. Mass. Amherst does: “knowingly representing the words or ideas of another as one’s own work without citation.”

After 25 Years, Massachusetts Finally Ends the Incarceration of Addicted Women

Published on: January 28, 2016 | by Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP

Last week, the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed H. 3944 (now H. 3947), An Act Relative to Substance Abuse, Treatment, Education and Prevention. The bill will, if passed, aim to curb the increasing numbers of opioid addictions and overdoses in Massachusetts. The House and the Senate, which passed a different version of the bill, will now wrangle over a final version. But there is one thing that both bodies agreed on: that our state is long overdue to end the incarceration of women who have been civilly committed for substance addiction. To that end, the House and the Senate separated out H. 3956, an Act Relative to Civil Commitments for Alcohol and Substance Use Disorders, and sent it to Governor Charlie Baker, who enacted the bill into law on January 25, 2016.

The law brings long overdue reform to a troubling system of civil commitment in Massachusetts. G.L. c. 123, section 35 is the law that governs the civil commitment of people who are addicted to alcohol or drugs. People in their lives—from family members to police officers—can petition the court to civilly commit a person they believe to be addicted. If the court agrees, it can commit that person to a treatment facility for up to ninety days. The problem is that the treatment facilities in Massachusetts are often filled to capacity, especially the ones that accept civil commitments. When the beds are full, the courts don’t stop committing people. Instead, the courts shunt them off to prison. Men are sent to Bridgewater, a minimum security facility where they continue to get addiction treatment comparable to the treatment they might have received in a hospital. They’re in prison—despite not having committed, or being charged with committing, a crime—but at least they are getting treatment.

An Update on the Law Concerning Campus Sexual Assault

Published on: January 19, 2016 | by David Russcol

Over a year ago, I published a blog post describing the unfair processes used by many schools to deal with complaints of sexual assault and harassment, and compared it to the criminal justice system. As I wrote then, the Department of Education (DOE) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has placed enormous pressure on colleges and universities under Title IX to take swift and decisive action against students accused of sexual assault, even though the stacked procedures and low standard of proof make it likely that many innocent students are being punished (often, suspended or expelled), with substantial damage to their reputations and future careers.

What has changed since then? For the most part, not very much. A different bureau of DOE, separate from OCR, did issue some regulations following amendments to the Clery Act and the Violence Against Women Act. The most noticeable impact of the regulations is that now, in cases involving sexual assault (but not necessarily misconduct short of sexual assault), schools must allow students to bring an attorney or other advisor of their choice to hearings and meetings in the disciplinary process. That is unquestionably a step forward. However, the regulations still permit schools to prevent counsel from taking an active role, and the standard if not universal practice is for attorneys to be able to attend but not participate, other than whispering or passing notes to the student.