Skip to main content

SCOTUS Denies cert

Image result for Trump


On Tuesday morning of this week, the Supreme Court of the United States denied cert in Unite Here v. Trump Entertainment Resorts.  In plain English, it denied appeal, which means that the decision of the court below stands.

Chapter 1113 of the bankruptcy code allows the debtor, here the Trump entity, to reject a collectively bargained agreement (CBA) under certain circumstances. This seems to put bankruptcy law at odds with the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRA prohibits an employer from unilaterally changing the terms of a CBA even after the agreement has on its own terms expired.

In this case the union, Unite Here Local 54, said that the bankruptcy court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to amend the contract terms in Trump's favor. But the bankruptcy court decided that  the more specific law prevails over the more general: section 1113 holds here. So it granted Trump's motion.

This is surely a case of what the presidential candidate who is a namesake of this corporate entity calls "working the system" in his favor. Of course once he is President he will use the same talents on our own behalf, on behalf of the whole people of the United States. And if you believe that, he'll sell you a famous bridge in his favorite city.

In this case he and his corporate entities worked the system so as to avoid their negotiated responsibilities regarding pensions, health insurances, severance funds, paid meal times and paid holidays. All the features of employment that separate old-fashioned middle class work from something distinctly lower-rung.

Anyway, the Third Circuit (which includes New Jersey, where the corporation involved is headquartered) upheld the decision of the bankruptcy court early this year. The decision says,  "[T]he authority to reject an executory contract is vital to the basic purpose to a Chapter 11 reorganization, because rejection can release the debtor's estate from burdensome obligations that can impede a successful reorganization." 

That is the judgment that SCOTUS has now allowed to stand.  That settles the legal question for the Third Circuit, but not for the remainder of the court, because a rejection of cert has no precedential effect.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more