Employment Law for HRD

Current Awareness

• Regularly reading general business publications such as the Wall Street Journal or BusinessWeek will  also serve to keep you up to date on headline legal developments in the areas of employment and labor law. Both are available via Business Source Premier
• Legal newspapers and magazines also cover cases, regulatory changes and legislative initiatives in state and federal jurisdictions.  Law.com is a good free source for current legal news
• HRhero.com  A good site for identifying hot topics in human resources law published by lawyers representing employers.

Browsing for Hot Topics

Scholarly journals for lawyers known as law reviews publish articles on developing areas of the law.  The following law journals are devoted to labor and employment law issues and are browseable in the specified database.  Scanning recent issues may spark ideas for your class case presentation.

Employee Relations Law Journal in Business Source Premier

Labor Law Journal Browse in Business Source Premier

Industrial and Labor Relations Review Browse in Business Source Premer

Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law Browse in Business Source Premier

Hofsta Labor and Employment Law Journal in Wilson Omnifile

Finding Legal Cases

Judicial cases found in legal publications will usually include complete citations.  The parts of a citation are the parties, year, court and ID or publication address. In the following example the parties are Breckenridge and Bristol-Myers, the year is 1987, the court Southern Distict of Indiana (abreviated in parenthesis) and the ID or publication address is 1987 U.S. Dist Lexis 13981 because that is were the case was made publically available or published.

Judicial cases discussed in non-legal professional or popular interest publications may only mention the parties and court, but omit complete citations.  You should be able to find many such cases by using Lexis-Nexis's "Parties" search.

Breckenridge v. Bristol-Myers 1987 U.S. Dist  Lexis 13981 (S.D. Ind., 1987)

Follow these steps to find the full text of a judicial opinion in Lexis-Nexis Academic (library subscription service).

• Activate the Legal tab
• Choose Federal and State cases from the left bar
• Fill the the case names or citation number (must be exact)

Current Examples and Practice

Christopher v. Smithkline Beecham, U.S. Supreme Court on overtime pay for phamaceutical industry sales persons.

Hofferica v. St. Mary Medical Center, Eastern District Pennsylvania 2011 on communication with employees during absence on FMLA leave.

Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, 1st Circuit decision on Defence of Marriage Act with implications for employee benefits.

Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, 131 S.Ct. 2541 (2011)

Finding Quotes about Employment Law Issues

Direct quotes about topics relating to employment law will be most easily found in news sources or trade and professional (but not academic or scholarly) publications. 

These databases focus on business topics so to limit your search to employment law issues combine your subject with keywords such as "law or legal or litigation or legislation."

ABI Inform, Business Source Premier and Business Full text allow you to limit or refine by document type to "interview."  Use this feature sparingly as it may eliminate articles that have excellent quotations.

ABI Inform

Lexis-Nexis

Business Source Premier

Business Full Text

Finding Law Reviews on Legal Cases

Law reviews are scholarly journals devoted to legal issues usually written by academics and published by law schools.  They are an excellent secondary source for learning about the context and ramifications of judicial decisions.  As such they may be helpful in preparing your team project.

Lexis-Nexis Academic  Search full text from legal tab

HeinOnline Better archive than search engine