Law Commons^™

A Fresh Look At Title Vii: Sexual Orientation Discrimination As Sex Discrimination, Anthony Michael Kreis

All Faculty Scholarship

Since 2006, the Illinois Human Rights Act has prohibited discrimination in employment because of an employee’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Until 2017, employees discriminated against because of their sexual orientation had no federal cause of action, however. In a landmark decision, Hively v. Ivy Tech, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit became the first appellate court to hold that federal law’s prohibition of sex discrimination in the workplace also proscribed sexual orientation discrimination. The Hively decision is a substantial departure from decades’ worth of Seventh Circuit precedent and created a split between the circuits. This Article examines …

Employment Discrimination And The Domino Effect, Laura T. Kessler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Employment discrimination is a multidimensional problem. In many instances, some combination of employer bias, the organization of work, and employees’ responses to these conditions, leads to worker inequality. Title VII does not sufficiently account for these dynamics in two significant respects. First, Title VII’s major proof structures divide employment discrimination into discrete categories, for example, disparate treatment, disparate impact, and sexual harassment. This compartmentalization does not account for the fact that protected employees often concurrently experience more than one form of discriminatory exclusion. The various types of exclusion often add up to significant inequalities, even though seemingly insignificant when considered …

The Preferred Preferences In Employment Discrimination Law, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In theory, customer preferences cannot justify discriminatory treatment by employers. The reality is more complicated. Built into the structure of federal employment discrimination law are several openings for customer preferences to provide employer defenses to what would otherwise likely be actionable discrimination.

This Article explores when and which customer preferences can enter those openings. It focuses on what I deem the “preferred preferences”: the customer preferences that have formed the basis of successful employer defenses to discrimination claims. This Article identifies and evaluates six such preferences: (1) aesthetic appeal; (2) physical privacy from employees of the opposite sex; (3) psychological …