Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal

For over a century, every state jurisdiction in the United State adhered to the common law rule of "employment-at-will." over a brief five year period in the early 1980s, however, a majority of state courts vreated judicial exceptions to this traditional rule.  Themost prominent of these exceptions provided that an employer disseminted handbook could form the basis of an employee's contractual claim for wrongful discharge.  By 1986, a majority of jurisdictions adopted the "handbook exception" to employment-at-will.