Law Commons^™

INTRODUCTION: To read federal case law decided under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 19641-the provision that prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and other characteristics-is to be struck by the continuing racial and sexual hostility in U.S. workplaces today, and also at courts' too frequent unwillingness to address it. Courts throw out plaintiffs' cases even where the facts involve such egregious employer behavior as, in the race context, supervisors repeatedly calling employees the n-word and using other racial epithets, ordering African American employees to perform work others in the same job classification do not …

INTRODUCTION Anyone involved in litigation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 19641 or similar state statutes may wonder what is entailed in proving or disproving discrimination after the United States Supreme Court's October 1988 Term. In fact, in the pending Civil Rights Act of 1990, Congress is considering reversing some of what the Supreme Court did during that Term. One of the issues that the Supreme Court addressed during the 1988 Term involved allocating burdens of proof in two major types of Title VII claims, dis- parate-treatment and disparate-impact. Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, dealt with a disparate-treatment …