RESPOND TO 2 PEERS:
1st Question was:
As a small-business owner, you are faced with rising costs, particularly employment costs, insurance, and the like. You decide to hire some friends and pay them as they work rather than go through the expense and procedure of bringing in “actual” employees. Your friends wear the business uniform, deal with vendors and customers, and tell friends and family that they work for the business. In one instance, one friend orders way too much from a vendor.
Explain agency law terminology and the three ways an agency relationship is created, per the text reading. What are the implications of agency law that apply in the above scenario? Is your business liable for the improper order? Why or why not? Be sure to explain the scope of employment.
Explain the applicability of the employment-at-will doctrine and identify and explain all the exceptions. If your employer does not like your hairdo, can he fire you? Pursuant to the doctrine, explain your answer per the law.
Research a recent case in your home state of wrongful termination in violation of the Employment-at-Will doctrine. Provide the facts, parties and what happened in the case. Use the link provided to the NEXIS-Uni Legal Database: https://libdatab.strayer.edu/login?url=https://www.nexisuni.com
PEER RESPONSE : Ashley
Agency Law is in which the principal grants authority to an agent. An agency involves a consensual relationship which both parties have responsibilities to adhere too. The general term agency can be used to refer to many different types of relationships. In the employer -employee relationship, the employers are referred to as the principals. Agents are those who do task on behalf of the principal. The agent represents the principal in such a way that if the agent negotiates a contract, the principal, but not the agent, is bound by the party to the contract. All employees are agents of the principal (employer)but not all agents are employees. It’s just like a contractor is hired to do a certain job and once that job is complete, they move on because they are not considered an employee. There are independent contractors, employers and employees, and master-servant relationships. The independent contractor acts on behalf of another to perform a task but is not under direct control of the other person. Principals (employers) have less responsibility for independent contractors. Master-servant relationships is a relationship in which the principal (master) exercises a great deal of control over the agent (servant). There are different factors that determine if the master-servant relationships exist such as level of supervision and control of the agent, nature of the agent’s work, regularity of hours and pay, and length of employment. Agency relationships are not governed by statutory law, but these relationships are governed by common law. The agency law involves examining three different areas such as creation of agency relationship, involving the relationships with principals and agents, and the relationship of the agents and principals to third parties.
The creation of agency relationships requires that there is express authority. Express authority is when an employee is hired by agreement (oral or written) and has been given that authority on behalf of the company. It is limited to what is spoken or evidenced by a record (written contract or communication). An express contract specifies the limitations of an employee/agent’s authority. There must be some type of record (written or electronic) of the agreement only if that state requires it. There are different types of authority that can be applied to the creation of an agency relationship such as implied authority, customary authority, and apparent authority. Implied authority is when an agent under contract not only has authority given but has an extension of express authority. Customary authority is always given to the agency relationship unless it is specified otherwise. In apparent authority holds principal liable if the principal makes others believe there is an agency relationship. The apparent authority exists by appearance in which whomever they believe is the agency becomes the agency. Sometimes ratification can happen in which the principal reviews a contract and voluntarily decides that, even if the agent did not have proper authority, the contract will be honored as if the agent had full authority.
The Principal and the Agent relationship is very important in the process. It is important to realize that a contractual relationship exists between the agent and the principal, so that each has certain obligations and rights. The two have a fiduciary relationship which consist of being loyal, truthful, caring and obedient. The duty of loyalty is crucial in this relationship. The agent must act only for the benefit of the principal and not represent both parties of the transaction. It is important that the agent signs a contract so that competition is involved in the contract.
Dealing with third parties can be a headache. Third parties have certain contract enforcement rights depending on the nature of the agent’s work and the authority given by principal. The liability of the principal for contracts made by an agent is controlled by the perceptions created for and observed by the third-party contract.
According to the scenario, I feel that I would be responsible because they are acting as my employees but are not legally employed by me which means I am liable for anything that they do. I am taking a risk because it’s my name that’s on their backs. The improper ordering of the materials from the vendor will fall back on me and I would just have to pay for the extra.
Employment-at-will is the right of an employer to hire or terminate noncontract employees at any time, with or without cause.
Exceptions to the rule:
Implied contract: This deals with the employee handbook/manual. It states that an employee manual represents a potential contract for the employer.
Public Policy: The court have offered protection to the whistle-blowers who report illegal conduct and to those who refuse to participate in the conduct that is illegal or violates public policy.
In the scenario the person can be fired for the haircut, if de did not have a written employment contract limiting the reasons for which they can be terminated by the Employment-at-will. It is not fair but that is the policy for that doctrine.
Thompson v Dekalb County
Mark Thompson was a former attorney for Dekalb County, GA and he was fired in 2015. Thompson sued the county, claiming that he was fired because of his age, in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The district court granted summary judgement for the county because he didn’t have substantial proof of the discrimination.
Thompson was a senior assistant county attorney for the Dekalb Law Department. He was the lead attorney representing the county in Champion v Dekalb County, a breach of contract case initiated by county contractor Paul Champion in 2010. While he was investigating the case, Thompson discovered that Champion had fraudulently overbilled the county with assistance of a county employee. Thompson testified about the fraud before a grand jury in February 2012.
In March 2013, Overtis Brantley was appointed the new county attorney. She held a meeting and basically stated that the chief of executive officer said he was tired of looking at older people and he wanted a younger team. Brantley began hiring baby lawyers which was the terminology she used. In every meeting she used the same terminology.
Thompson workload was getting hard, so they provided him with help. Eventually it was time again for the case and his supervisor asked him to have a clean record meaning not to include the fraud that had taken place. He stated to his supervisor that she was making a huge mistake and she still denied it. Thompson eventually withdrew from the case and did not want his appeal. Thompson kept getting denied and then it was proven of the discrimination and the court overturned the ruling and he was promised the pay of benefits.
Jennings, M.M. (2000). Business: It’s legal, ethical and global environment. West.
Nexis UNI: Academic Research Toll for Universities & Libraries. Nexix Uni/ Academic Research Tool Universities & libraries. (n.d.). Retrieved May 12, 2022, from
Question 2 was:
How would you respond to a statement that says that by increasing the sample size, the amount of sampling error will be decreased?
PEER RESPONSE WAS:Ayesha
When working with a sample size greater than 30, the Central Limit Theorem can be applied to figure out the normal distribution of a given population. Central Limit Theorem (CLT) is a “powerful statistical concept” that is at the heart of “hypothesis testing” (Analytics Vidhya, 2019).
Central Limit Theorem uses samples from a defined population. When using CLT for statistical calculations, it is essential to define the sample population. Let us say we need to find out the average weight of all college students in the country. We would first define the parameters of the sample and then utilize a sample from the population. The sample would be a subset of the country’s total population of college students. (Yıldırım, 2020)
The sample size has a close relationship to four variables, “standard error of the sample, statistical power, confidence level, and the effect size of this experiment” (Zhu, 2020).
When conducting research, one might not know “which mean is the same as the sample mean,” so in selecting many “random sample” from “a population, the sample means will cluster together,” thus presenting the researcher to “make a very good estimate of a population mean” (McLeod, 2019)
Thus, when the sample size increases, the sampling error will decrease because the CLT states that the more samples are added, “the sample averages will tend towards a normal distribution regardless of the population distribution” (Yıldırım, 2020)
References
Analytics Vidhya. (2019, May 3). What is A Central Limit Theorem | Central Limit Theorem in R. Analytics Vidhya, Retrieved May 12, 2022, from
Yıldırım, S. (2020, May 18). Central Limit Theorem — Explained with Examples | by Soner Yıldırım. Towards Data Science. Retrieved May 12, 2022, from
Zhu, Z. (2020, September 30). How is Sample Size Related to Standard Error, Power, Confidence Level, and Effect Size? Towards Data Science. Retrieved May 12, 2022, from
