Law Commons^™

Unifying Antidiscrimination Law Through Stereotype Theory, Stephanie Bornstein

Stephanie Bornstein

Has litigation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reached the limit of its utility in advancing workplace equality? After four decades of forward progress on antidiscrimination law in the courts, Supreme Court decisions in the last decade have signaled a retrenchment, disapproving of key theories scholars and advocates had pursued to address workplace discrimination in its modern, more subtle and structural forms. Yet sex and race inequality at work endure, particularly in pay and at the top of organizations. Notably, while the Roberts Court majority appears skeptical that discrimination persists and resistant to recognizing the role …

Internal Dispute Resolution: The Transformation Of Civil Rights In The Workplace, John M. Lande, Lauren B. Edelman, Howard S. Erlanger

Lauren Edelman

Many employers create internal procedures for the resolution of discrimination complaints. We examine internal complaint handlers' conceptions of civil rights law and the implications of those conceptions for their approach to dispute resolution. Drawing on interview data, we find that complaint handlers tend to subsume legal rights under managerial interests. They construct civil rights law as a diffuse standard of fairness, consistent with general norms of good management. Although they seek to resolve complaints to restore smooth employment relations, they tend to recast discrimination claims as typical managerial problems. While the assimilation of law into the management realm may extend …

Justice, Employment, And The Psychological Contract, Larry A. Dimatteo, Robert C. Bird, Jason A. Colquitt

Larry A DiMatteo

The paper is a multidisciplinary collaboration between contract law, employment law and management scholars and draws from the fields of law, management, and psychology. After reviewing and noting the gaps in the employment and justice literatures, this paper presents the findings of a survey of 763 participants to measure whether certain variables—procedural and substantive fairness, as well as educating employees on the principle of employment at will—impact the propensities of employees to retaliate and litigate at the time of discharge. The survey results are significant and striking. We find statistically significant reductions in retaliation and litigation rates when survey respondents …

Redefining "Employee" To Provide Worker Protections Within A Flexible Workforce, Robert Sprague

Robert Sprague