Law Commons^™

Compensatory Damages In Federal Fair Housing Cases, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The federal fair housing laws became effective in 1968. Since then, courts have often awarded damages to victims of housing discrimination, but their decisions have provided little guidance for assessing the amount of such awards. There is a great range of awards, with some courts awarding only nominal damages of $1 and others setting awards of over $20,000. Compounding the problem is the difficulty of measuring the principal element of damages claimed by most plaintiffs in fair housing cases, noneconomic emotional harm or other forms of intangible injury.

Rarely is the basis for the amount of the court's award satisfactorily …

A Tale Of Two Amendments: The Reasons Congress Added Sex To Title Vii And Their Implication For The Issue Of Comparable Worth, Michael Evan Gold

Duquesne Law Review

The author of this article examines and dispels the frequently cited account that the provisions against sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were created as a Congressman's joke or as an attempt to defeat the bill. He analyzes the background of the Smith and Bennett amendments, focusing on the congressional debates as they appear in the Congressional Record. He concludes that the Members of Congress were serious about sex discrimination, and that this seriousness has important implications for the interpretation of Title VII.

Recent Development: Amenability Of Foreign Corporations To United States Employment Discrimination Laws, Kevin C. Tyra

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

As the Linskey court noted, the existence of employment exemption provisions in over thirty commercial treaties, if liberally construed, would create a loophole in Title VII enforcement. Given the ever-increasing number of United States employees of foreign-owned corporations, liberal treaty constructions could decrease the scope of Title VII.

Nevertheless, the effect on international commerce must be considered. Although equal employment opportunity is a laudable goal, this goal may conflict with the values of other cultures, as it did with the culturally-based organization and management philosophy of the C. Itoh Co. A more prudent approach to the problem of subsidiaries might …