Legal Writing
The best part of being a union lawyer is that
I actually get paid to be disrespectful to authority.
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76 National Lawyers Guild Review 191 (2019)
in which I argue that
unions are paying the price
for the business-unionism
we've been addicted to since the 1930s
We have to recover our autonomy as mutual-aid societies independent of capital.
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If workers belong to unions only because their boss tells them they have to,
we are nothing but parasites on the corporate body.
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I often get asked to present
at American Bar Association panels
for corporate lawyers.
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It's like playing the villain in a vaudeville show,
the boogeyman in a Halloween haunted house,
to scare the bejeesus out of associates in big corporate firms:
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"Don't open the closet door!"
The unintended consequences of data analytics.
Big Data gives employers unprecedented insight into the labor market, but it also makes the employers' thinking more transparent.
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Plaintiffs can now reverse-engineer the employer's own analytics
to prove that AI is enforcing systemic discrimination.
Right-wing courts are trying to resurrect the Lochner era from 1905 - where businesses had absolute rights against anything that got in their way:
laws, unions, weekends.
I argue that we can't fight back just by whining.
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We have to repeat the incantations
that progressives like Brandeis used
to out-witch them in the first place.
It's not that pro-business courts say awful things.
It's that they can't get their story straight.
(with co-author Jamie Raskin)
The "mutilated banner of secession"
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The MAGA folks demanding a flag-desecration amendment should be careful what they wish for.
The Confederate flag was designed as a knock-off, a depiction of the Union's flag on fire.
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So if you want to throw people in jail for displaying a burning flag, we're coming for you,
Marjorie Taylor Green,
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Theory and Practice of Threat Response
I love answering corporate threat letters.
In 2013, my storyteller comrade got threatened with arrest
for political chalk art on the sidewalks of Coolidge Corner.
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Here's my letter to the City of Brookline.
and the news story after they backed down.
DoTheMostGood is a progressive activist group in Maryland.
The Salvation Army threatened them for trademark infringement,
(the Salvation Army slogan is "Doing The Most Good.")
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Boy, was this a fun letter to write.
Court cases
In 2004, a Sheet Metal Workers local
boycotted a Tampa hospital for using scab labor
with an inflatable rat balloon.
The Feds came after us for "illegal picketing,"
but my partner Arlus Stephens and I
got the D.C. Circuit to say:
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hey, this is too hilarious to be illegal.
The Venetian Hotel's owner
MAGA billionaire Sheldon Adelson
sued union picketers in Vegas for trespass.
He said the Las Vegas Strip sidewalk
was his private property.
But that jive is long gone, daddy-O,
Ring-a-ding-ding, First Amendment, baby.
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Viva Las Vegas