Boston Lawyer Blog

“I Think What You Did Was Illegal”: Stops and Searches Based on Mistakes of Law

Published on: January 30, 2015 | by David Russcol

The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable” searches and seizures, but what the courts consider “unreasonable” has evolved and shifted over time. One overarching trend over the last few decades is that police officers have been given significant leeway, and usually the benefit of the doubt, to stop and search individuals in various ways. Under federal law, police can search people and their property under warrants that turn out to be invalid, as long as they are acting in the good faith belief that the warrants are valid. The Supreme Court has held that police can validly arrest someone under a law that is later ruled unconstitutional. And police can stop or search someone whom they suspect of illegal activity, even, in some circumstances, if the suspicion was based on inaccurate or faulty information.

One common area where Fourth Amendment rights come into play is traffic stops. The police cannot stop a driver for no reason; such a stop must generally (with narrow exceptions such as sobriety checkpoints) be based on a reasonable suspicion that the driver has violated the law. However, courts routinely uphold stops under the Fourth Amendment when an officer’s attention is drawn to a car based on a hunch (or even racial profiling). A common police tactic is to follow a car until it commits some type of traffic violation or other infraction, and then use that as the basis to stop the car and make further inquiries. Courts have routinely refused to look past this gambit, holding that it is permissible to stop someone if there is in fact a traffic violation, no matter what the officer’s “real reason” for a stop was.

Supreme Court: Your Boss Can Waste Your Time Without Paying You

Published on: December 10, 2014 | by David Russcol

Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court ruled that, under federal law, employees only have to be paid for time spent working or on activities necessary to perform their jobs – even if their employers require them to be there longer. In Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, employees of a contractor for Amazon.com were not paid for time spent, after the ends of their shifts, waiting for an anti-theft security screening. Although the employees claimed that the employer could have eliminated the wait time by using more metal detectors or staggering shifts, it did not do so, and so they waited as much as 25 minutes every day without pay.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets a national minimum wage and provides that employers, with some exceptions, must pay time-and-a-half for overtime (more than 40 hours per work week). In general, a work week includes all the time that an employee is required to be at the office or work location. However, a 1947 law called the Portal-to-Portal Act carved out exceptions to this principle. At issue in the Busk case is an exception for activities “preliminary to or postliminary to” an employee’s “principal activity or activities.” The “principal activity” is whatever the employee is hired to do – so in the Busk case, the “principal activity” is finding items in a warehouse and shipping them to Amazon customers. The “principal activity” also includes activities that are necessary to perform the job safely (putting on a protective suit in a chemical factory) or effectively (sharpening a knife in a butcher shop).

So You’ve Been Accused of Sexual Assault or Misconduct on Campus. Here’s What You Need to Know

Published on: October 27, 2014 | by David Russcol

Colleges, universities, and graduate schools have had a reputation for not taking students’ complaints of sexual misconduct seriously. School disciplinary systems that were set up to deal with cheating, plagiarism, and more “academic” misconduct are ill equipped to deal with the complexities of interpersonal relationships that often come into play when there is conflict regarding sex. Undoubtedly some schools have swept accusations of rape or harassment under the rug. But in about 2001, the pendulum started to swing in the opposite direction, and today schools are under intense pressure from the federal government to investigate, convict, and discipline students as quickly as possible for any perceived incident of sexual misconduct, or else risk the “death penalty” of losing all federal funding. Because schools are no better equipped to deal with adjudicating sexual assault complaints now than they were 10 years ago, this well-intentioned reversal of attitudes frequently results in an unfair process where innocent students can be quickly railroaded to a preordained outcome in which they are branded rapists and expelled without any of the protections they would receive in the criminal justice system.