After the close of the General Assembly’s 2021 legislative session, we published an editorial decrying the “mess” that is the Connecticut common law of non-competition agreements, which prohibit employees from competing with their former employers after their employment ends.

As we explained, several features of non-compete litigation render that area of law unusually immune to common law development, such that the enforceability of a particular non-compete now “rest[s] not on any clear vision of the [substantive] legal doctrine or its predictable application to the evidence, but on which Superior Court judge happens to draw the case.” That, of course, is not how the law is supposed to work, and we urged the Legislature to step into the breach.