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Full-Text Articles in Law

Flying Without A Statutory Basis: Why Mcdonnell Douglas Is Not Justified By Any Statutory Construction Methodology, Sandra F. Sperino Jan 2006

Flying Without A Statutory Basis: Why Mcdonnell Douglas Is Not Justified By Any Statutory Construction Methodology, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The McDonnell-Douglas three-part burden-shifting framework has come under increasing attack in recent years. While policy arguments in favor of eliminating the standard are important, one of the strongest arguments in favor if its demise, is that the standard was adopted without proper regard to the operative text, the legislative history, and the broad policies of Title VII. This Article examines the McDonnell-Douglas framework through four leading models of statutory construction and concludes that a satisfactory statutory justification for the test is lacking. While it arguably may have been appropriate to justify this lapse in the past by claiming that the …


The Fundamental Incoherence Of Title Vii: Making Sense Of Causation In Disparate Treatment Law, Martin J. Katz Jan 2006

The Fundamental Incoherence Of Title Vii: Making Sense Of Causation In Disparate Treatment Law, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes a new approach to both prohibition and compensation. On the prohibition side, it proposes penalties and incentives that are unrelated to compensation. This approach will make clear that discriminatory conduct is prohibited irrespective of its effect on plaintiffs and ensure that such conduct is adequately deterred. On the compensation side, this Article proposes a new causal standard: a “necessity-or-sufficiency” test, along with a comparative fault approach to determine what level of compensation is due. While these proposals may seem radical in the context of disparate treatment law, they are widely accepted in modern tort law—the field from …


Fielding A Team For The Fans: The Societal Consequences And Title Vii Implications Of Race-Considered Roster Construction In Professional Sport, N. Jeremi Duru Jan 2006

Fielding A Team For The Fans: The Societal Consequences And Title Vii Implications Of Race-Considered Roster Construction In Professional Sport, N. Jeremi Duru

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Professional sports organizations' relationships with their players are, like other employer-employee relationships, subject to scrutiny under the antidiscrimination mandates embedded in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Professional sports organizations are, however, unique among employers in many respects. Most notably, unlike other employers, professional sports organizations attract avid supporters who identify deeply with the teams and their players. To the extent an organization racially discriminates, therefore, such discrimination creates the risk that fans will identify with the homogenous or racially disproportionate roster that results. The consequences of such race-based team identification are wide-reaching and potentially tragic. Through …


Harassment Of Sex(Y) Workers: Applying Title Vii To Sexualized Industries, Ann C. Mcginley Jan 2006

Harassment Of Sex(Y) Workers: Applying Title Vii To Sexualized Industries, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

Like the women blackjack dealers at the Hard Rock, cocktail servers, exotic dancers, and prostitutes in legal brothels are vulnerable to sexual harassment by customers. The content of the four jobs reveals the fallacy of the "good girl"/"bad girl" dichotomy, because all four jobs require behavior that falls into both categories if we expand the definition of good and bad girls to include gendered behavior as well as sexual behavior. Once the defense applies to discrimination in sexualized environments, it could logically apply to sexual or racial harassment cases in companies that permit their employees to harbor and act upon …


Grutter At Work: A Title Vii Critique Of Constitutional Affirmative Action, Jessica Bulman-Pozen Jan 2006

Grutter At Work: A Title Vii Critique Of Constitutional Affirmative Action, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This Note argues that Title VII doctrine both illuminates internal contradictions of Grutter v. Bollinger and provides a framework for reading the opinion. Grutter's diversity rationale is a broad endorsement of integration that hinges on the quantitative concept of critical mass, but the opinion's narrow-tailoring discussion instead points to a model of racial difference that champions subjective decisionmaking and threatens to jettison numerical accountability. Title VII doctrine supports a reading of Grutter that privileges a view of diversity as integration and therefore cautions against the opinion's conception of narrow tailoring. Grutter, in turn, can productively inform employment discrimination law. The …