I Am Not a Lawyer

Now that I’m back at my own desk and can look through the blogs more thoroughly, some goodies I missed:

Bush signed GINA. I continue to be pleasantly surprised by the bipartisan support for this bill, which seems like it might cost employers money down the road when they make potentially discriminatory decisions based on employees’ health status. BTW, in case you thought I was exaggerating about workplace penalties for smokers, here’s an article on the subject from Workforce Management. Added bonus: Prickly LA Times owner Sam Zell is mentioned in the context of his pro-smoker changes at the Tribune Company. Posts on GINA from Greg Valenza at What’s New In Employment Law? and Sheppard Mullin’s Labor Employment Law Blog. Workplace Prof Blog adds a post about an EEOC letter discussing when health-condition-related job placement might violate the ADA.

Speaking of Workplace Prof Blog, it goes into some detail about the Ninth Circuit’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” decision. Again, that decision applies the sexual privacy rights found in Lawrence v. Texas to the military’s DADT policy, creating heightened scrutiny for that and possibly other laws relating to private sexual behavior. Prof. Secunda sees it as a potentially groundbreaking decision for employee sexual privacy rights, if they can get over the military-specific nature of the decision. However, a commenter points out that this decision was from an atypically liberal panel of the Ninth, so nobody should be counting any chickens just yet.

Greg May says the Prop. 22 people have filed for rehearing in In re Marriage Cases. I’m not sure I see any motivation for the justices to revisit it, but I am sure the same-sex marriage opponents felt they had to try. In related news, the LA Times found a bare majority in California telling pollsters they’d vote in favor of this fall’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage — but the outcome isn’t clear.

Finally, I didn’t realize until earlier this week that cragistlist and eBay were duking it out in court. They’re suing each other over a stockholder deal gone sour (it’s a little complicated) when eBay launched a site intended to compete with craigslist. I hadn’t heard of this competing site until I read the article, so I doubt it’s making much money right now, but eBay’s behavior as described there fits with some of the aggressive corporate action I learned about when investigating alternatives to PayPal. Kimberly Kralowec at The UCL Practitioner links to apparently detailed but subscription-only articles on the subject from the Recorder and the Daily Journal.