Labor Law: Cases and Materials

The Fifteenth Edition makes a number of significant changes in its predecessor edition, published in 2006. In the past five years, the law relating to employers, employees and unions has evolved, in part because of developments in the workplace that reflect changes in the U.S. economy, and in part because of the dramatic departures from precedent on the part of the National Labor Relations Board as appointed by President George W. Bush. The Obama-appointed NLRB will, by the publication date of the fifteenth edition, have addressed many of these departures and will have in turn reshaped the law within its administrative powers. The Republican-led House of Representatives has already signaled its intention to restrain this administrative change. These political and economic developments since the earlier edition are reflected in the inclusion of new major cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals and the National Labor Relations Board. State legislatures have also become more assertive in regulating the workplace, and this has raised important questions of federal preemption of state law, another area reflected in new material in the fifteenth edition. A hallmark of the predecessor editions of this casebook has been the pointed and stimulating questions for classroom discussion, designed to test the students' understanding of particular cases and their underlying analysis, and the students' ability to assess the reach of those cases in new factual situations. Every problem in the fourteenth edition has been reevaluated for the fifteenth, resulting in the deletion of many, the revision of others, and the insertion of new ones. Moreover, textual notes have been revised throughout the casebook in order to deal with current issues.