Law Library Newsletter for November

Click here or the image to the left for this month’s issue of D-Brief, the Law Library Newsletter, written by Cynthia Pittson, Head of Reference Services. Cynthia writes about the fictional Don Draper from her favorite TV show Mad Men and the very real Lilly Ledbetter, tips for finding paper topics using BNA databases, and old final exams available on the Law Library TWEN site.

Tomorrow, Nov. 3, is Election Day. The League of Women Voters of Westchester has a combined ballot listing all local races. Smartvoter.org from the League of Women Voters has nonpartisan election information for federal, state, and local elections.

Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009

As posted on BeSpecific, in January 2009, president Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which supersedes the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc., 550 U.S. 618 (2007).

Ledbetter had required a compensation discrimination charge to be filed within 180 days of a discriminatory pay-setting decision (or 300 days in jurisdictions that have a local or state law prohibiting the same form of compensation discrimination). The Act restores the pre-Ledbetter position of the EEOC that each paycheck that delivers discriminatory compensation is a wrong actionable under the federal EEO statutes, regardless of when the discrimination began. As noted in the Act, it recognizes the “reality of wage discrimination” and restores “bedrock principles of American law.”