Law Commons^™

Whose Motive Matters? Discrimination In Multi-Actor Employment Decision Making, Rebecca H. White, Linda Hamilton Krieger

Scholarly Works

The search for a discriminatory motive in disparate treatment cases often is envisioned as an attempt to determine whether a supervisor, despite his denials, consciously acted out of bias, animus or on the basis of “inaccurate and stigmatizing stereotypes” in making an employment decision. Framing the search for discriminatory motive is this way, however, cannot prove fully effective in eliminating discrimination, as individuals may be unaware of their own biases or the influences those biases have had on their own decision making.

The reality of decision making in the employment area, moreover, is that multiple individuals are often involved in …

Section 1983, The First Amendment, And Public Employee Speech: Shaping The Right To Fit The Remedy (And Vice Versa), Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

This Article is not about theories of free speech and how they bear on the public employment context, nor does it contribute to the academic debate over what the aims of public employee speech law ought to be. I take the Court at its word when it says that its aim is to give substantial weight to both the value of speech and the government's interest as an employer. Unlike Massaro and Ingber, I take it as a given that the government may insist on hierarchy and obedience to authority in the workplace. Unlike Rosenthal, I begin from the Court's …