I hope everyone had a happy holiday season. Now that we are into the nasty, brutish and short days of January (and especially for our friends suffering through Winter Storm Hercules), I will try to warm things up with a couple of weird-but-instructive sexual harassment cases.

The weather outside is frightful, but the fire's so delightful!

Our first case involves a type of harassment ...

Employers, has this ever happened to you?

An employee in a critical-but-inflexible position -- say, a customer service representative -- asks for "intermittent" leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. If the intermittent time off is "scheduled," it's usually not too big a problem. Most employers can manage to work around a situation if they know what to expect. They may be able to ...

All right, kiddies. My posts over the last few weeks have been juicy and entertaining. (Or as juicy and entertaining as employment law can get.) But summer is over, and it's time to buckle down.

"I h8 school!"

The Supreme Court of the United States (aka "SCOTUS") began its new term this past Monday, and it will be reviewing at least four employment cases, as well as two non-employment cases ...

"Love means having to say you're sorry." Wait a minute. Is that a typo? 

No. Erich Segal, I beg to differ. As anyone who has a life knows, love means having to say you're sorry a lot. And that goes for employers, too. The company apology is a fine thing, as long as it is sincere, not a "non-apology apology," and accompanied by what they call a "firm purpose of amendment."

If you don't apologize when ...

Giddyap! It's been a short week, but we have tons to talk about in the labor and employment law world!

Thinking out loud about the impact of yesterday's DOMA decision on the Family and Medical Leave Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit* held yesterday that Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. Section 3 provides that, for purposes of ...

How many readers knew it was illegal to discriminate against white people . . . or guys?

The reason I ask is that we had a decision this week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which hears appeals from federal courts in the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. A majority-African-American school board was found by a jury to have ...

Latest dispatches from the employment law front:

If you're going to be an SOB, make sure you're an SOB to everybody. A federal district court in Kentucky granted summary judgment to the employer in a sexual harassment case. The female plaintiffs alleged that a charlatan "turnaround specialist" hired by their CEO was not "motivated by sexual desire" but was simply abusive and ...