Law Commons^™

Retaliation: 462 Clark County School District V. Breeden, 532 U.S. 268 (2001), Rebecca White

Scholarly Works

Clark County School District v. Breeden, to my mind, has always been a sleeper case. A per curiam opinion, it takes up no more than five pages in the US reports, yet when I taught this case to my employment discrimination students, we often would spend a full class period – and sometimes more – on it. Why? Because it presents virtually every issue that can crop up under section 704 of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the statute’s antiretaliation provision.

Employment Discrimination Remedies And Tax Gross Ups, Gregg D. Polsky, Stephen F. Befort

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This article considers whether a successful employment discrimination plaintiff may be entitled, under current law, to receive an augmented award (a gross up) to neutralize certain adverse federal income tax consequences. The question of whether such a gross up is allowed, the resolution of which can have drastic effects on litigants, has received almost no attention from practitioners, judges, and academics. Because of the potentially enormous impact of the alternative minimum tax (AMT) on discrimination lawsuit recoveries, however, the gross up issue is now beginning to appear in reported cases.

The three principal federal anti-discrimination statutes - Title VII, the …

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

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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 …

De Minimis Discrimination, Rebecca H. White

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Is there any basis for a de minimis exception to our employment discrimination laws? This Article suggests a way of analyzing the issue of de minimis discrimination that comports with the language of and policies underlying Title VII and also with judicially developed disparate treatment theory. It approaches this project from a normative and doctrinal, not a deontological, perspective. Congress has enacted laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, and the appropriate question, in the first instance, is how those statutes should best be interpreted. Although the focus is on Title VII, the analysis undertaken here may be usefully applied to other …

Civil Rights--Federal Jurisdiction--Exhaustion Of Adequate And Appropriate State Administrative Remedies Is A Prerequisite For Judicial Review Under Section 1983, Camilla E. Watson

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Georgia Patsy, a white female secretary, brought a civil rights action under section 1983 of title 42 of the United States Code against Florida International University in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging employment discrimination in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States. The district court dismissed the action for failure to exhaust state administrative remedies. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed on the ground that failure to allege exhaustion of state remedies did not preclude a section 1983 cause of action. On rehearing en banc, the court …