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Comment by aliston | Hacker News Reader

The question isn’t whether they’re doing a job, it’s whether drivers are acting as contractors vs employees while performing the job.

Ironically, taxi drivers are also contractors. I’m surprised nobody has brought up the fact that the status quo pre-Uber was a contractor model as well.

The real problem is that the Dynamex decision is legislation from the bench that redefines “contractor.” The historical definition of a contractor was basically only c in the abc test. It will be interesting to see how the court decisions come down. As the press release points out, the precedent so far is mixed.

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Just dropping in to say that “legislation from the bench” is a charged, shallow criticism that says nothing except about the critic’s own political philosophy. The fact is, courts have been legislating from the bench for as long as we have had courts, and before then — the U.S. inherited its judicial traditions from England, after all. California is a common law jurisdiction. The essence of common law is that courts create law in the course of issuing their holdings.

Without going down the rabbit hole of Constitutional Law, I’ll just point out that there are folks on the Federal Supreme Court that disagree, in principle, that courts should be making laws.

That aside, if you think it’s a shallow criticism in this case, why do you think it required legislative action to have any effect? In other words, if this wasn’t legislation from the bench, ab5 is a noop.

I’m well aware that there are Supreme Court justices who claim to believe that courts should not make law. And yet... they continue to make law every time they contribute to a majority opinion.

As to AB5, I’m not really educated on the particulars of Dynamex or the political process around AB5 to opine on why it’s been codified. There are many possible reasons, ranging from a desire to try to freeze the law in place, to, as you say a “noop.” This, too, is just a part of the system.

Um, do you know what AB5 IS?

AB5 is a law codifying the Dynamax decision--the precise opposite of legislating from the bench.

I was talking about the Dynamex decision, not ab5. Obviously legislation is not legislation from the bench.

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