Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Minnesota Law Review Headnotes

Abstract

In her Article entitled Truth and Lies in the Workplace: Employer Speech and the First Amendment, Professor Helen Norton has highlighted an Achilles’ heel of labor and employment law, and has sought to address it: that body of law is almost completely dependent for its enforcement on employees’ assertion of their own rights; yet employees are widely ignorant of their rights, and employers sometimes actively mislead them. Her focus is not on how the law might intervene to educate employees and protect them from misinformation; there are some familiar policy tools at hand both to regulate employer misrepresentations and to compel truthful disclosures. Her focus instead is on a particular kind of legal challenge to those legal measures, one grounded in the First Amendment. Her Article joins a burgeoning critical literature on the “deregulatory First Amendment,” in which legal scholars have sought to expose and push back against the transformation of the First Amendment from a shield for dissidents, outsiders, and grassroots activists into a sword for wealthy corporations. Her particular focus on employer speech about employee rights is a valuable contribution to that literature, and highlights some old and new challenges within employment law. Let us first back up to survey the landscape on which these challenges have emerged.

First Page

349

Volume

101

Publication Date

2017

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