Minnesota Lawyer

The term "hostile environment" has made its way from the courtrooms into common parlance. Like the Miranda warning for criminal suspects, the phrase "hostile environment" has become part of our national culture.

Minnesotans this Thursday will join the rest of the country in commemorating one of the nation's quintessential holidays, Thanksgiving.

The major revision to the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. secs. 12101-213, enacted in September 2008 and effective January 2009, was widely heralded as making the anti-disability discrimination measure more user-friendly for employees.

The doctrine of estoppel is not beloved by the law. It usually is raised in a desperate fashion, somewhat like a "Hail Mary" pass to the end zone in the last moments of a football game.

The upcoming mid-term elections for all members of the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate, as well as more than a third of the gubernatorial positions, may be viewed by many as a test of the popularity of President Barack Obama and his administration's policies.

As the U.S. Supreme Court gets ready for its upcoming term, which begins on the traditional first Monday of October, the savants are still dissecting the remnants of the court's 2009-10 term.

As the new school year commences at nearly all educational institutions, teachers in Minnesota are reeling from a series of legal setbacks. The losses add to their troubles as they face dwindling job prospects due to enrollment declines and budgeting reductions.

Exculpation clauses - provisions in contracts that disclaim liability - pose huge obstacles for personal injury claimants. The courts in Minnesota have increasingly expanded their scope and retrenched on restrictions in fending off personal injury claims.

Arbitration has been around as a form of alternative dispute resolution for more than a century. Initially disowned by the courts, arbitration gained widespread acceptance following a trio of related decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court 50 years ago endorsing the mechanism as a viable vehicle in labor management-labor disputes. See United Steelworkers of America v. American Mfg. Co., 363 U.S. 564 (1960).

A vexing and volatile feature of Minnesota employment law over the past four decades has been the “single-incident” doctrine. A long-standing principle of unemployment compensation proceedings, it was conceived in the common law, codified, modified, retrenched, revived and now revised.