Posts on ‘November 12th, 2009’

The Central Intelligence Agency’s refusal to allow Valerie Plame Wilson to disclose her possible pre-2002 status as a covert agent does not violate the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. Wilson’s resignation from the CIA became effective in January 2006, three years after columnist Robert Novak reported her status as an “agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” When the CIA later tried to redact parts of Plame?s 2007 memoir, she and her publisher, Simon & Schuster Inc., sued.

As the H1N1 virus continues to spread nationally, employment lawyers are getting a lot of calls from clients. Littler Mendelson has received “thousands” of inquiries on the topic, said San Francisco partner Garry Mathiason. Primarily, the questions coming in are about how to maintain a safe workplace without stepping on the rights of apparently sick employees. One hot-button issue, then, is how to combat so-called “presenteeism,” or ill employees coming to work.

Social media is dramatically changing the way we communicate inside and outside the workplace, while blurring the distinctions between work, home and play. Employers need to take advantage of the opportunities that the new media offers, while avoiding the liabilities it creates.

A federal jury on Tuesday awarded more than $6.2 million in an age discrimination suit brought by two scientists who said they were fired from their jobs at a Pennsylvania chemical manufacturing firm when the company targeted only older workers in layoffs in 2005. Significantly, the jury concluded that PQ Corp.’s age discrimination was “willful” — a finding that leads to an automatic doubling of each plaintiff’s back pay award. The jury also awarded hefty compensatory damages for the emotional damage they suffered.

The Supreme Court in September first considered the petition in a closely watched challenge to a law school’s decision to deny official recognition to a Christian student group because it does not conform to the school’s requirement that membership and leadership positions be open to all. The Court did not act then, and it has re-listed the case for five subsequent conferences, including the one scheduled for this Friday. The Christian group, among others, is mystified at the unusually long delay.

Regulators do not need to show bad faith when sanctioning someone for unethical conduct, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled. The decision came in a case involving an investment banker who disclosed a client’s confidential information, and required the court to interpret a New York Stock Exchange rule that subjects members to discipline for engaging in “conduct or proceeding inconsistent with just and equitable principles of trade.”

A New York appeals panel has declined to declare a mistrial in a fatal child abuse case because a juror asked the court for the name and number of the assistant district attorney, whom the juror referred to as a “cutie.” In the same note to the judge during deliberations, the juror asked whether she could read a statement thanking her fellow jurors and asked the judge if he could give her the name of a divorce lawyer. The juror was reprimanded and questioned to ensure she wasn’t biased in favor of the prosecution.