Takeaway:No doubt anticipating an appeal to the California Supreme Court, the state appeals court issued an exhaustively reasoned opinion illustrating the extent to which courts typically have deferred to enforcement agency interpretations — a practice that may come under scrutiny in both state and federal courts in today’s regulatory environment.
Fifty years after the California Legislature enacted the Educational Employment Relations Act (EERA), a state appeals court has decided for the first time that strikes are legal under the law and that public school employees may engage in unfair labor practice strikes.
The Oakland Education Association (OEA) is the exclusive representative of certain employees of the Oakland Unified School District, a public-school employer. Following a dispute over certain school closures approved by the district, OEA members conducted a one-day work stoppage and filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), claiming the closures violated the EERA. The district filed a competing charge claiming that the OEA’s one-day strike itself was an unfair labor practice. The PERB held that the district violated the EERA and that the OEA did not. On the district’s appeal, the court upheld the PERB’s substantive rulings.
In 1975, the legislature enacted the EERA, which:
The cost and pricing of pharmaceuticals are matters of substantial scrutiny. In March 2025, a jury in an Illinois federal court decided in favor of a pharmacy chain that its false claims for medica...