JUST NOTICE: RE-REFORMING EMPLOYMENT AT WILL

This Article proposes a fundamental shift in the movement to reform employment termination law. For forty years, there has been a near consensus among employee advocates and worklaw scholars that the current doctrine of employment at will should be abandoned in favor of a rule requiring just cause for termination. This Article contends that such calls are misguided, not -- as defenders of the current regime have argued -- because a just cause rule grants workers too much protection vis-a-vis management, but because it grants them too little. A just cause rule provides only a weak cause of action to a narrow subset of workers: those able to prove they were fired for purely arbitrary reasons. In contrast, today's employers operate principally in an external labor market in which implicit promises of long-term employment have been replaced by implicit promises of long-term employability.