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Shortcuts In Employment Discrimination Law, Kerri Lynn Stone

Faculty Publications

Are employment discrimination plaintiffs viewed by society and by judges with an increased skepticism? This article urges that the same actor inference, the stray comment doctrine, and strict temporal nexus requirements, as courts have applied them, make up a larger and dangerous trend in the area of employment discrimination jurisprudence- that of courts reverting to special, judge-made "shortcuts" to curtail or even bypass analysis necessary to justify the disposal or proper adjudication of a case. This shorthand across different doctrines reveals a willingness of the judiciary to proxy monolithic assumptions for the individualized reasoned analyses mandated by the relevant antidiscrimination …