A Proposal to Improve the Workplace Law Curriculum from a Corporate Compliance Perspective
St. Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 58, p. 155, 2013
University of Toledo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2014-06
55 Pages Posted: 23 Feb 2014 Last revised: 23 Nov 2014
Date Written: 2013
Abstract
This article proposes and justifies a new labor and employment law course that I call “Corporate Compliance in the Workplace.” My goal was two-fold. First, I wanted to propose a course that moved away from the traditional silos of the workplace law curriculum — employment law, employment discrimination, and labor law. Because the practice of labor and employment law involves the interaction of all three areas of workplace law, I wanted to develop a course that would cover the material in a way that more accurately simulates the actual practice of labor and employment law. The second goal was to propose a course that would give students the practical skills that they often do not learn elsewhere in law school — non-litigation, transactional skills related to advising employers on the compliance with the vast body of workplace laws. This article includes a survey of how law schools across the country are teaching the workplace law curriculum, including which workplace law skills courses are currently being taught. It then identifies some of the issues that arise in the practice of labor and employment law that involve the interaction of all three areas of the traditional workplace law curriculum. Finally, this article introduces a template of what such a course might look like and which practical skills it would cover.
Keywords: discrimination, pedagogy, labor law, workplace law, curriculum, transactional skills
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