Legal News

It?s My Party, I?ll Invite Who I Want! Or Not

By Dan Slater

Parents, you know those moments when you don’t invite the whole class to the birthday, or your kid doesn’t get invited? It’s awkward. Perhaps even painful. But is it a lawsuit?

Lund, Sweden, by night.

You’re not invited! That’s what we wondered when we read this BBC article about an eight-year-old boy in Sweden who “sparked an unlikely outcry” after he neglected to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party. The boy’s school, located in Lund, a city in the south of Sweden, said he violated the children’s rights and has complained to the Swedish Parliament. The school argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination.

The boy handed out his birthday invitations during class-time, the article says, and when the teacher spotted that two children had not received one the invitations were confiscated. In the boy’s defense, his father says the two children were left out because one did not invite his son to his own party and he had fallen out with the other one.

A brewed awakening for the boss: A Loyal Law Blog Reader alerted us to this Philadelphia Inquirer article (blogged by Classic Values), about a receptionist who, after being told one too many times to fetch coffee for the boss, responded with a lawsuit, but to no avail.

Earlier this month, District Judge Berle M. Schiller decided that Tamara Klopfenstein’s managers at National Sales & Supply had not created a hostile and discriminatory work environment by requiring her to fetch them coffee. Here’s the opinion.

“The act of getting coffee is not, by itself, a gender-specific act,” Schiller wrote. The fact that a vice president wrote “looks nice, dresses well,” on notes when she was hired also doesn’t add up to discrimination, the judge wrote. “While the behavior of plaintiff’s supervisors may have been rude, gauche, or undesirable, their actions do not violate federal or state anti-discrimination laws.”

Klopfenstein, who worked at the company for six weeks in 2006, plans to appeal, said her attorney, Timothy M. Kolman. Brian Jackson, the lawyer who rep’d National Sales & Supply, said he never asks his assistant for coffee - mainly because he likes to get out of the office.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 02, 2008 (boomark / email).