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The doctrine of employment‐at‐will has been the rule of law for over 100 years in the United States. Under it an employee can be terminated for a good reason, a bad reason, or for no reason at all. Because of real abuses when firing employees, generally called wrongful termination, all but five U.S. states have now carved out at least one of three exceptions to the rule. They are implied contract, public policy tort, and the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Although created with good intentions, all three exceptions have spawned a legal environment of judicial inconsistency and unpredictability and a climate of expensive litigation and monetary judgments. The Model Employment Termination Act, if adopted by all the states, would establish a uniform legal system for managing employee terminations. The Act's major provisions require that an employee can be terminated only for “good cause,” and, in the “preferred version” that arbitration be used in settling disputes. However, an employee's remedies are limited and can include reinstatement, back pay, lump‐sum severance payments, and reasonable attorneys' fees and costs, but no compensatory or punitive damages.

In their book Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene (1990) stated that one of the ten “megatrends for the 1990's would be the rise of “The Age of Biology.” One of the central forces behind this societal shift which is occurring right now, they say, is research into understanding human genetics and the rise of biotechnology. The scientific knowledge regarding human genetics and the technology to examine an individual's genetic makeup have grown at a rapid pace, especially in the last decade as a result of the Human Genome Project. This venture has been labelled alternatively as “mediocre science” (Roberts, 1990b: p. 804) and as “biology's Holy Grail,” (Nelkin and Tancredi, 1989: p. 14). It is indisputably a monumental scientific undertaking, likened to the drive to put a man on the moon in the sixties (“The Geography of Genes,” 1989). This knowledge and the resultant trends will likely prove to be important factors not only in our future economy, but also in the nature of how we understand ourselves.