The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)1 is among the top items on President Obama’s legislative agenda; it was a clear campaign promise to a core constituency—organized labor. Most Southern business and political leaders strongly oppose EFCA’s practical elimination of secret ballot union representation elections, as well as its imposition of labor contracts through government-controlled interest arbitration. They see EFCA as a rustbelt eff ort to impose a failed business model on sunbelt employers. Because EFCA is perceived to threaten decades of social and economic development progress, aggrieved state legislatures may well retaliate by passing laws that purport to regulate union organizing, strikes, and related activities already regulated by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Opponents of such state laws may argue, based on decades of judicial decisions, that the NLRA pre-empts state  regulation of labor relations. Southern business and political leaders are already preparing to fi ght this battle....

The new Obama administration generated great expectations, not least among those seeking to craft a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on “global warming.” Yet early signals that an Obama administration had no plans to join Europe in agreeing to a successor pact next December, as expected, indicated that this issue would instead prove a stunning disappointment to its champions. Now, however, it appears that Kyoto will be the subject of a controversial effort to sharply revise U.S. environmental treaty practice....

A project labor agreement (“PLA”) is a union collective bargaining agreement that all contractors must sign to work on a construction project. In Boston Harbor, the Supreme Court held that a government entity acting as an owner-developer of a public construction project could lawfully require compliance with a union-only PLA, without running afoul of federal preemption, on the presumption that a private owner-developer could lawfully take the same action. As a result of this 1993 decision, the use of PLAs on public construction projects has dramatically increased....

The February 2009 issue of Engage is now online. Engage provides original scholarship on current, important legal and policy issues. Through its publication, we aim to contribute to the marketplace of ideas in a way that is collegial, measured, and insightful—and hope to spark a higher level of debate and discussion than is all too often found in today’s legal community. [Read now!]