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The Failure Of Punitive Damages In Employment Discrimination Cases: A Call For Change, Joseph A. Seiner
The Failure Of Punitive Damages In Employment Discrimination Cases: A Call For Change, Joseph A. Seiner
William & Mary Law Review
Punitive damages were described by one early court as "an unsightly and an unhealthy excrescence." Although views toward punitive relief have changed over the years, the debate over the availability of exemplary damages in the judicial system has remained controversial. No place is that controversy more aptly demonstrated than in employment discrimination law, where punitive damages first became available in an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after a bitter congressional debate. Almost a decade ago, in Kolstad v. American Dental Association, the Supreme Court provided guidance on how punitive damages should be applied in …
The Continuing Drift Of Federal Sovereign Immunity Jurisprudence, Gregory C. Sisk
The Continuing Drift Of Federal Sovereign Immunity Jurisprudence, Gregory C. Sisk
William & Mary Law Review
With the enduring doctrine of federal sovereign immunity, it is too late in the day to suggest that the United States should be treated as an ordinary party in the federal courts. Yet as the Supreme Court has become more comfortable with the increasingly common encounter with a statutory waiver of immunity, the rigidity of interpretive approach has eased. An early jaundiced judicial attitude has resolved into a greater respect for the legislative promise of relief to those harmed by their government. After sketching the history of statutory waivers over the past century-and-a-half and examining Supreme Court decisions across the …
Reconstructing The Race-Sex Analogy, Serena Mayeri
Reconstructing The Race-Sex Analogy, Serena Mayeri
William & Mary Law Review
In the standard account, American sex equality law rests on a partial and imperfect analogy to race, developed in the 1970s by feminists intent on establishing formal equality between men and women, and embraced, albeit selectively and uneasily, by lawmakers and judges. But this account, although containing important elements of truth, obscures the creative ways that advocates turned the tables, arguing that principles developed in sex equality jurisprudence could expand the availability of remedies for racial injustice. This Article explores one example of this phenomenon: efforts, led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to use the emerging constitutional distinction between detrimental and …