Opinion Paper - Business Law Class Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Opinion Paper - Business Law Class - Essay Example In the U.S. Supreme Court Ninth Circuit case, heard in 2007, the Court ruled that a group of contract workers from the company, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), did not have to disclose certain information in the background checks NASA wanted to do. NASA would normally complete all these checks before employing someone on a full-time basis. This information related to the workers’ previous drug use and counseling, and questions about the workers’ honesty posed to the employee’s references. NASA could also force the employees to sign a release so that personal information could be researched from the employees’ schools, previous employers, and other sources (The HR website 2011). The Supreme Court (Ninth Circuit) ruled that the contracted workers’ rights would be violated by such background checks, since previous drug use or counseling for drug use would not be relevant to their present contract with NASA, and that the opinions of previous employers could not be used to decide whether JPL could use these workers for the NASA contract. In both cases, the judgment felt that the workers’ constitutional rights would be violated by such checks. On Appeal, the Supreme Court reversed this previous decision (NASA v. Nelson 2011), making it possible for NASA to do the same background checks on contracted workers as it does on full time employees.