This volume, part of the Feminist Judgment Series, shows how feminist legal theory along with critical race theory and intersectional modes of critique might transform immigration law. Here, a diverse collection of scholars and lawyers bring critical feminist, race and intersectional insights to Supreme Court opinions that deal with the source of the power to regulate immigration, state and local regulation of immigration, citizenship law, racial discrimination, employment law, access to public education, the rights of criminal defendants, the detention of noncitizens, and more. Feminist reasoning values the perspectives of outsiders, exposes the deep-rooted bias in the legal opinions of courts, and illuminates the effects of ostensibly neutral policies that create and maintain oppression and hierarchy. One by one, the chapters in this book reimagine the norms that drive immigration policies and practices. In place of discrimination and subordination, the authors here demand welcome and equality. Where current law omits the voice and stories of noncitizens, the authors here center their lives and experiences. Collectively, they reveal how a feminist vision of immigration law could center a commitment to equality and justice and foster a country where diverse newcomers readily flourish with dignity.

Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical framework with an examination of the regime’s changing approach to labor control. It explains why the Chinese regime has moved away from overt coercion and adopted atomized incorporation and argues that the change could be understood from a political economy perspective. The empirical findings show that the central government and the local governments in developed industrial regions have a new incentive to implement pro-labor policies, even when they undermine the profitability of export-oriented sectors. The chapter contrasts the specific components of the new strategy with the strategies of authoritarian labor control observed in Latin America and East Asia.

Chapter 7 argues that law-abiding firms’ concerns for reputation generate discursive resources, which contribute to workers’ expectations of success. Unlike collective action for legal rights, interest-based protests rarely use disruptive tactics that physically expand the scope of conflict. Instead, workers use publicity tactics to attract the attention of third-party allies who exercise direct influence over the target firm’s policies. The main channel examined in this chapter is media exposure. It shows that workers at law-abiding firms have more discursive resources due to their firms newsworthiness and thus are more prone to expect that their protests would succeed. This shows that even in the more favorable environment for atomized protests, not all workers have the resources to engage in collective action. By limiting social mobilization, the regime has been able to manage the frequency and nature of atomized protests. At the same time, workers with the resources to engage in atomized protests are much less likely to hold the central government responsible for the situation they are in.

This chapter explores the decisions of low-income factory workers employed in light manufacturing industries in relation to their social insurance benefits. It discusses why many factory workers have chosen to withdraw their social insurance money early rather than accumulating the social insurance benefits to receive a pension in their retirement. The chapter shows that, as workers experience unstable work and subsist on low incomes, they have come up with tactics that exploit the law to fulfil their daily needs. These tactics allow the workers to withdraw their social insurance early in a way that complies with the letter of the law but actually undermines law's objective and authority. The justifications for their actions reveal their struggle with family needs and financial hardship, and their moral obligations to family members. This chapter analyzes the complex and multifaceted nature of workers’ legal consciousness as they face a trade-off between their needs and their legal rights.

As an introduction to the volume, this chapter begins by reframing the commonly held notion that labor and competition law exist in a kind of natural conflict, both historically and conceptually. It also draws together themes from many of the other ‘framing’ chapters, which largely present issues that cut across jurisdictions and international frameworks. Finally, it puts the geographical coverage of the volume in perspective, highlighting related areas of inquiry yet to be explored.

This Chapter deals with the Court’s decisions on the reach of the National Labor Relations Act, and its revisiting cases involving intergovernmental immunities, including a reconceptualization of them as impicating primarily questions about interpreting federal statutes rather than the Constitution. It also examines some cases raising questions related to those decided in Blaisdell and the Gold Clause Cases, and shows that the Court did not repudiate the restrictive implications of those decisions.

Conventional workplace law includes the law of collective bargaining and employment contracts. This chapter argues that, to fully understand how law constructs worker power, industrial democracy, and political democracy, workplace law should greatly broaden in scope. The “new labor law” should encompass components of many fields of law that influence worker power and democracy as much as many components of conventional labor law. These additional components are lodged in domestic and international finance law, social wage law, constitutional law, communication law, tax law, and many more fields. The chapter applies the new labor law to critique and offer proposals to reconstruct existing law in the service of empowering workers in the workplace and polity, within both capitalist economies and imagined democratic socialist regimes.

The definition of labor rights for Korean workers has changed since the 1980s along with the neoliberal transformation of the economy. While workers demanded humane treatment and the right to form autonomous labor unions in the earlier period, labor rights in present day Korea are anchored on workers’ status recognition and the right to secure employment. Also, the methods through which workers press for their rights have shifted from union-based collective action to symbolic and extreme forms of protest. This chapter examines the changing notion of labor rights by investigating how structural conditions in the labor market generate workers’ primary grievances, how these grievances enlighten workers’ rights consciousness, and how workers’ interactions with employers and state institutions, including via labor laws, shaped the core claims of labor rights in the 1980s and the 2000s, respectively. It also compares the forms of collective action that workers take to assert their rights in these two periods.

As the United States tax system continues to grapple with how to tax workers in the gig economy, it confronts a number of questions about the nature and composition of the sector as well as the tax issues confronted by its participants. Many of these questions have proven difficult to answer due to a lack of adequate information. But the answers are important and will shape how tax and other areas of law (such as employment law, labor law, and antitrust) respond to the gig economy. Thus, the question of how to obtain the data and information necessary to formulate sound policies for gig work is vital. This chapter discusses the limitations of quantitative empirical research on the gig economy and argues that incorporating more qualitative approaches will help generate a more comprehensive understanding of the tax policy issues involved. Adoption of a diverse set of research approaches is crucial because the administrative tax return and labor survey data are incomplete and are shaped by prior decisions of gig economy firms and participants. Many questions remain that such quantitative data, by its very nature, cannot answer. This chapter first identifies the key tax issues at stake in the gig economy, including tax administration, worker classification, and tax impacts on workforce decisions. It then discusses the key ways in which quantitative approaches do not fully capture the tax issues at stake. Finally, it details how qualitative research methods such as interviews and case studies can flesh out gaps in the quantitative data, can help interpret quantitative data, and can help answer questions that extend beyond the scope of quantitative data, yielding a richer account of gig economy tax issues than that provided by quantitative tax administrative and labor survey data alone.

While the transitional justice model, and “bottom-up” business and human rights strategies place emphasis on the role international actors and powerful foreign courts in the Global North play in advancing victims’ demands for justice, victims of corporate complicity in past human rights violations have rarely received justice using that strategy. This chapter examines the role of national courts in responding to victims’ demands for corporate accountability. It also examines how the Archimedes’ Lever analogy produces “justice from below.”

The first part of the chapter examines “justice form below” through a cross-national comparative analysis. It identifies where, when, and what type of corporate accountability has been achieved.Italso considers where progress toward corporate accountability from below through domestic courts has not been achieved.The next section attempts to explain those outcomes, drawing on a continuum of accountability outcomes and case studies to illustrate our argument. The conclusion explores the transformative potential of domestic judicial action in shaping international human rights.It also sets forth a set of guidelines for implementing “justice from below.”

This chapter teaches readers how to think about government regulations on pay. Although a lot is said about specific US laws, the primary focus is on how to think about regulation in general, so the discussion is portable across countries even where the local laws differ. Section 4.3 introduces a prescriptive mnemonic concept called the “3 Cs” of constraints: Comprehend, Circumvent, Comply. The idea is that managers first need to comprehend the constraints that impede their efforts to maximize company profit. They should then search for creative ways to circumvent those constraints (without violating ethics or the law). Finally, to the extent that they cannot circumvent the constraints, they must comply with them. The ethical issues surrounding the second of these Cs are discussed. Both anti-discrimination laws and wage-and-hour laws are discussed, including FLSA, ADA, ADEA, EPA, FMLA, and others. There is extensive discussion of floors and ceilings on both the monetary and non-monetary components of pay. An example of floors on paid time off draws on the concept of the marginal worker from Chapter 3 to show that regulations limit the variety of pay plans offered in the market.

This chapter teaches readers how to think about government regulations on pay. Although a lot is said about specific US laws, the primary focus is on how to think about regulation in general, so the discussion is portable across countries even where the local laws differ. Section 4.3 introduces a prescriptive mnemonic concept called the “3 Cs” of constraints: Comprehend, Circumvent, Comply. The idea is that managers first need to comprehend the constraints that impede their efforts to maximize company profit. They should then search for creative ways to circumvent those constraints (without violating ethics or the law). Finally, to the extent that they cannot circumvent the constraints, they must comply with them. The ethical issues surrounding the second of these Cs are discussed. Both anti-discrimination laws and wage-and-hour laws are discussed, including FLSA, ADA, ADEA, EPA, FMLA, and others. There is extensive discussion of floors and ceilings on both the monetary and non-monetary components of pay. An example of floors on paid time off draws on the concept of the marginal worker from Chapter 3 to show that regulations limit the variety of pay plans offered in the market.

Mary Ann Glendon is a prolific and broad-ranging scholar who has also made important forays into public service on behalf of the United States and the Holy See. Her scholarly work can be best understood not as the systematic development or application of a particular jurisprudential school of thought, but rather as the painstaking work of pursuing a series of insights into the transitions to be made in law and in society, across a broad range of discrete topics, around the turn of the twenty-first century. Certain persistent and coherent themes have animated and united her work, especially ideas that resonate deeply with Catholic social thought. Across her scholarly writing on labor and property law, family law, the legal profession, constitutional law, and international human rights, she has remained persistently concerned with the role and importance of mediating institutions of civil society, especially families, with the systemic relationships between law and society, and with the unique importance of comparative methods to help arrive at a sound balance between universal ideals of justice, liberty, and dignity, on the one hand, and the value of the diversity and particularity of local communities, on the other.