Chicago Global

Employees’ Misperception about their Rights

An interesting study shows that employees do not perceive to be employed at will. Pauline T. Kim, Bargaining with Imperfect Information: A Study of Worker Perceptions of Legal Protection in an At-Will World, 83 Cornell L. Rev. 105 (1997). The employees in such studies were presented with several descriptions of discharges of workers, identifying the reason for each discharge, and asking whether these discharges were lawful. The result showed a tendency that employees perceive to be better protected than they actually are by the employment at will doctrine and its exceptions in the respective states. They live under the impression that termination of their employment relationship is possible only for job-related reasons, which resembles much more the for cause rule than the at will doctrine that actually governs their employment. "Workers appear to systematically overestimate the protections afforded by law, believing that they have far greater rights against unjust or arbitrary discharges than they in fact have under an at-will contract." Kim, at 106.

While it seems plausible in many areas that laymen do not know the exact legal rules due to a lack of information, this systematic misperception poses a puzzle. The goal of this blog post is to show to what extend this misperception can be explained by systematic errors and biases tied to the heuristics that employees use to evaluate the degree of their legal protection. Furthermore, I will draw conclusions on what that means for the employment at will doctrine.

The creation of the International Court for Cambodia

New Steps towards International Justice

Very significant news for the international human rights community flourished one month ago, when, on March 14th, the United Nations and the government of Cambodia signed a series of multiple agreements for the creation and establishment of the legal foundations for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a special tribunal that will try Khmer Rouge leaders accused of horrific crimes, including mass killings and genocide.

Under these international agreements, a newly created ad hoc trial court and a Supreme Court within the Cambodian legal system will investigate those most responsible for crimes and serious violations of Cambodian and international law between April 17, 1975 and January 6, 1979.

The international community has witnessed that during the last decade, unprecedented steps have been taken to limit the impunity of atrocious war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since the early 1990´s we are witnessing the creation of new international criminal justice mechanisms which apply universal jurisdiction to hold perpetrators of the most serious crimes that the human race has ever committed.

Relativization of Sovereign Immunity

Every year countries turn to foreign private financial entities in order to obtain finance for several different reasons, from specific projects to be able to pay its short-term internal obligations. However, although it is not the rule, sometimes a country interrupts the payment of its debts with foreign private creditors, not performing its obligations assumed with such foreign private financial entities. And because of that, those financial entities have filed lawsuits in foreign courts in order to recover their losses from the defaults.

Such facts bring to discussion a matter that has been occupying scholars and judges for many years: if countries that are debtors do not perform their obligations assumed before foreign private creditors, can such foreign private creditors charge, in foreign courts, such debts? According to the traditional principle of sovereignty of nations, every and any judicial lawsuit against one State can only be filed in the national courts of such State. In the last decades, however, we have seen a relativization of this principle.

Sovereign immunity can be divided in two parts, that can not be confused: the immunity of jurisdiction, that is related to the immunity of a nation to have a lawsuit filed against it before a foreign court; and the immunity of enforcement, that is related to the immunity of a nation to have an enforcement lawsuit filed against it before a foreign court.