JAMES A. WOOTEN, University at Buffalo Law School, SUNY
Email: JWOOTEN@BUFFALO.EDU

The preemption language in section 514(a) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) is exceedingly broad. The preemption language in the law ERISA replaced - the Welfare and Pension Plans Disclosure Act of 1958 (WPPDA) - was exceedingly narrow. There were four stages in Congress's journey from the narrowly circumscribed preemption of state law under the WPPDA to the sweeping suppression of state law under ERISA. This article covers the first three stages, tracing the evolution of ERISA's preemption language from the enactment of the WPPDA to the end of the Ninety-Second Congress. The next article in this series will describe the legislative history of the preemption provision in the Ninety-Third Congress, which enacted ERISA.

TROY B. DANIELS, Northern Kentucky University - Salmon P. Chase College of Law
Email: troy.daniels823@gmail.com
RICHARD A. BALES, Northern Kentucky University - Salmon P. Chase College of Law
Email: balesr@nku.edu

Courts in Title VII retaliation cases disagree over the evidentiary value of temporal proximity evidence when an employer fires an employee weeks or a few months after the employee engaged in protected activity. Seven circuits have adopted the Temporal Proximity Alone approach, which views temporal proximity evidence as sufficient, standing alone, to establish the causal connection element of a plaintiff's prima facie case. Three circuits have adopted the Temporal Proximity Plus approach, which requires that temporal proximity be combined with other evidence before it can establish the causal connection element. The Supreme Court has acknowledged the split of authority but has not yet granted certiorari.

This article argues that courts should require Temporal Proximity Alone at the prima facie case stage of the analysis, but require Temporal Proximity Plus at the pretext stage, an approach we call the Plus at Pretext approach. This novel approach maintains a relatively light burden on discrimination plaintiffs at the prima facie case stage of proof, but compensates by imposing a heavier burden at the pretext stage. It is both the best policy approach and it neatly reconciles existing case law.

MATT STAHL, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: mstahl@uwo.ca

Authorship and ownership exist in a curious relation in U.S. copyright law. In theory and common sense, authorship underwrites and is the condition of ownership, but in practice ownership can establish authorship retroactively. Distinctions between proprietary and non-proprietary creative cultural workers, in this view, turn in no essential way on evidence of creativity or the investment of personality in cultural creation. This paper examines a legislative struggle between recording artists and the recording industry over the status of their stock-in-trade, sound recordings. In 2000, recording artists obtained the repeal of a 1999 law allocating authorship and ownership of recordings to their record company contractors through the former's assertions not of authorship in the commonsense understanding, but through the artists' legal ability to alienate their employed backup musicians, engineers and other creative personnel. Analyzing this struggle against the backdrop of a historical/theoretical consideration of the dynamics of domination and dispossession naturalized in the employment relationship, I show how the political-economic organization of creative production in the cultural industries depends crucially on and further naturalizes this legal furniture of the social world (Ellerman, 1992), as much or more than it does on immanent aspects of cultural products or production processes.

MICHAEL H. LEROY, University of Illinois College of Law
Email: m-leroy@uiuc.edu

Judicial review of arbitration awards is highly deferential- but when does it become rubber stamping? Using original data, I find that federal courts vacated only 4.3 percent of 162 disputed awards. Nearly the same result was observed for a sub-sample of 44 employment discrimination awards under Title VII. By comparison, federal appeals courts in 2006 reversed 12.9 percent of 5,917 rulings made by civil court judges on the merits of legal claims.

Why are the rulings of Article III judges scrutinized more than the awards of citizen-arbitrators? What does this mean when companies can avoid Article III court rulings by requiring employees to arbitrate their claims? Judicial review of awards based on statutory claims is inadequate, and undermines the constitutional role of federal courts.

I explore these empirical findings from a historical perspective. English kings and merchants helped to fashion modern arbitration. Nearly 700 years ago, small merchants traded goods at fairs that operated under a royal franchise. Arbitrators improved the efficiency of these markets by adjudicating transactional disputes. This role was codified by the Statute of the Staple of 1353, where the king delegated his sovereign power to ensure the success of the fair.

I point to two prominent junctures - in 1698, and again in 1925 - when lawmakers in England and the U.S. believed that court litigation hampered commerce. They enacted similar statutes to authorize courts to confirm disputed awards, unless these private rulings resulted from corruption or misconduct. This deference grew out of practical considerations. The parties had chosen the arbitrator, agreed to the private process, and bound themselves to an industry norm.

Courts deferred so heavily to awards because William III wanted these merchant tribunals to be autonomous. His law, the 1698 Arbitration Act, did not allow courts to vacate awards for fact finding or legal errors. Great deference in its reviewing standards reflected the king's infallibility.

My textual research shows that the FAA's reviewing standards descended from William III. I suggest that our law crowns today's statutory arbitrator with the king's mantle of infallibility. But this deference is too extreme for awards that rule on statutory claims. In Gilmer v. Johnson/Interstate Lane Corp., the Supreme Court ignored the commercial history of arbitration when it broadly approved a theory of forum substitution. Gilmer said that arbitrators may decide statutory claims, even if one disputant objects to the forum and wishes, instead, to be heard by a court. The result is that the ruling of the arbitrator is subject to a narrower standard for review than an Article III judge's order. Epitomizing this regal deference, a contemporary court said: "The arbiter was chosen to be the Judge. That Judge has spoken. There it ends." In textual and empirical analysis, I show that statutory arbitrations enjoy a presumption of royal infallibility. I conclude with two solutions for aligning the review of rulings by statutory arbitrators and Article III judges.