Date: Thursday, October 22, 2009

Location: Suffolk University Law School, 120 Tremont St., Boston, MA
Time: 04:00 PM - 07:00 PM

“The law of employment discrimination today is not what it was before 10 a.m. Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled against the City of New Haven for scrapping a fire department promotional exam that appeared to favor white test-takers,” wrote Linda Greenhouse in the June 29, 2009 edition of the New York Times, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano. The importance of Ricci is hard to overstate. Yet, it was only one of several game-changing developments in employment law this year.

The first half of 2009 witnessed some of the most significant changes in our understanding of employment law since the Supreme Court’s 1989 Term. On January 1, the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 became effective, promising to change the way that issues surrounding the definition of disability are understood and litigated. In April, the United States Supreme Court decided 14 Penn Plaza LLC v. Pyett, potentially limiting the rights of unionized employees to redress statutory discrimination claims in a judicial forum. In its June decision in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, the Supreme Court held that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act does not allow for liability on a “mixed motives” theory. In Ricci, the Court laid down new principles governing the relation between disparate treatment and disparate impact liability under Title VII. Our own Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court also contributed to the cavalcade with its decision in Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority v. Carmen’s Local 589, seemingly opening the way for unionized employers to settle discrimination claims impacting a collective bargaining agreement without the union’s consent.

These developments will have an immediate and dramatic impact on the litigation and resolution of employment law disputes, as well as the counseling that employment lawyers give their clients. All attorneys with employment and labor law practices stand to benefit from a current assessment of the law and of where we go from here. This program will provide legal analysis of all of this year’s developments in employment law, discussion of practitioners’ views about the impact of these changes on plaintiffs, defendants and in house counsel, and the perspective of a distinguished federal district court judge on how these recent developments may be received in the courts.

• The potential impact of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 and the judiciary’s response to those changes

• How Ricci changes our understanding of Title VII disparate treatment and disparate impact claims and their interrelationship

• The implications of the Court’s rejection of mixed motive claims under the ADEA

• The circumstances under which individuals in unionized workplaces might be required to have their claims resolved In arbitration and in which the employer can have those claims resolved outside the judicial system

• The impact of state anti-discrimination laws on the right of unionized employers to settle discrimination claims inconsistent with the governing collective bargaining agreement without the union’s consent

37TH ANNUAL ROBERT FUCHS LABOR LAW CONFERENCE New Directions and New Faces at the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor This year’s annual conference has been moved to March 16, 2010. More information will be available soon.