Alaska Employment Law

Westlaw’s ”Alert Center” will periodically issue you pointers to cases and other authorities that contain search terms that you’ve specified.  If you want to be advised every time the District of Alaska issues a (Westlaw-published) document that contains the words “employee” and “discrimination” in the same paragraph, Westlaw will oblige.  There’s no extra fee if you want weekly bulletins; if you want more frequent Alerts, it’ll cost, and it’s not cheap.

One peculiarity that you’ll notice if you use Alerts is that Westlaw occasionally advises you of older opinions.  This week’s bulletin to me, for instance, contained eight opinions from the Alaska Attorney General, mostly from 1988.   A call to the Westlaw research attorneys produced two possible explanations: 1) Westlaw had just obtained the opinions and added them to its databases in the last week; or 2) Westlaw already had the opinions in its databases but had, only within the last week, corrected spellings in the opinions that then fit within my search terms.  Given the number of opinions from the same period, I suspect the latter former in this case.

One of the 1988 AG opinions addressed the privacy rights of delinquent student loan borrowers. An Anchorage attorney had requested the names and adresses of those ex-students, perhaps as part of an effort to represent them all.  The AAG (Thomas Wagner) opined that the individuals’ privacy rights outweighed the public’s interest in disclosure if collection efforts in court hadn’t started.  1988 WL 1547355.