Law Commons^™

Ledbetter V. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Derrick A. Bell Jr.

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Conference, Conciliation, And Persuasion: The Seventh Circuit's Groundbreaking Approach To Analyzing The Eeoc's Pre-Suit Obligations, Lisa M. Deleon

Seventh Circuit Review

In EEOC v. Mach Mining, LLC, the Seventh Circuit sharply diverged with its sister circuits when it held that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)'s statutorily mandated conciliation process is immune from judicial review. In Mach Mining, the Seventh Circuit addressed the provision contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that requires the EEOC to engage in "informal methods of conference, conciliation, and persuasion" with an employer before it can file a discrimination lawsuit against that employer. These pre-suit negotiations, or "conciliation," provide an opportunity for the EEOC to reach an out-of-court agreement with …

Does Testing = Race Discrimination?: Ricci, The Bar Exam, The Lsat, And The Challenge To Learning, Dan Subotnik

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Aptitude and achievement tests have been under heavy attack in the courts and in academic literature for at least forty years. Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) and Ricci v. DeStefano (2009) are the most important judicial battle sites. In those cases, the Supreme Court decided the circumstances under which test could be used by an employer to screen employees for promotion when the test had a negative racial impact on test takers. The related battles over testing for entry into the legal academy and from the academy into the legal profession have been no less fierce. The assault on testing …

What's So Reasonable About Reasonableness? Rejecting A Case Law-Centered Approach To Title Vii's Reasonable Belief Doctrine, Matthew W. Green Jr.

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The article critiques recent application of the reasonable belief doctrine under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII’s anti-retaliation provision, in pertinent part, provides that “it shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to discriminate against any of his employees … because he has opposed any practice made an unlawful employment practice [under Title VII].” Literally read, the provision requires that an employee oppose a practice Title VII actually makes unlawful. If the employee does so and is retaliated against, the statute affords the employee relief. While the U.S. courts of appeals have …

Weathering Wal-Mart, Joseph A. Seiner

Notre Dame Law Review

In Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2531 (2011), the Supreme Court held that a proposed class of over a million women that had alleged pay and promotion discrimination against the nation’s largest retailer could not be certified. According to the Court, the plaintiffs had failed to establish a common thread in the case sufficient to tie their claims together. The academic response to Wal-Mart was immediate and harsh: the decision will serve as the death knell for mass employment litigation, undermining the workplace protections provided by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII). …

The Tort Label, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Courts and commentators often label federal discrimination statutes as torts. Since the late 1980s, the courts increasingly applied tort concepts to these statutes. This Article discusses how courts placed employment discrimination law within the organizational umbrella of tort law without examining whether the two areas share enough theoretical and doctrinal affinities.

While discrimination statutes are torts in some general sense that they do not arise out of criminal law and are not solely contractual, it is far from clear that these statutes are enough like traditional torts to justify the reflexive and automatic use of tort law. Employment discrimination statutes …

A Reasonable Belief: In Support Of Lgbt Plaintiffs' Title Vii Retaliation Claims, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

When an LGBT employee is punished for complaining about discrimination in the workplace, he or she has two potential causes of action under Title VII: first, a challenge to the underlying discrimination, and second, a challenge to the resulting retaliation. The first claim is vulnerable to dismissal under courts’ narrow interpretation of Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination “because of sex” as applied to LGBT plaintiffs. But such an outcome need not determine the fate of the second claim. Faithful application of retaliation law’s “reasonable belief” standard, which protects a plaintiff from reprisal so long as she reasonably believed that she …

Lessons From The Dolphins/Richie Incognito Saga, Kerri Lynn Stone

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Irresistible As A Matter Of Law: Why Title Vii Jurisprudence Administered The Coup De Grace To The Purposivist Method Of Statutory Interpretation, Robert A. Pellow

Barry Law Review

No abstract provided.

Delimiting Title Vii: Reverse Religious Discrimination And Proxy Claims In Employment Discrimination Litigation, Andrea J. Sinclair

Vanderbilt Law Review

In July 2012, Chick-fil-A President and Chief Operating Officer Dan Cathy remarked to a religious publication that he and his company supported the "biblical definition of the family unit."' Chick- fil-A is popularly known as a Christian company that promotes conservative, biblical values. Mr. Cathy's statement was largely interpreted by the media as an "anti-gay" sentiment rooted in religious beliefs. In response to Mr. Cathy's remark, government officials from Boston and Chicago refused to allow the restaurant chain to open new locations in their cities, citing the organization's official policy of "discrimination." The Chick-fil-A controversy demonstrates how the intersection of …

Twenty Years Of Compromise: How The Caps On Damages In The Civil Rights Act Of 1991 Codified Sex Discrimination, Lynn Ridgeway Zehrt

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article takes a novel approach and reexamines the legislative history surrounding the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 with a central focus on exploring the issue of capped damages. Part I begins by briefly contrasting and summarizing the diverging remedies available under 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and Title VII. The article then shifts in Part II to an examination of the political climate and legislative history that forged the enactment of the 1991 Act, paying particular attention to the debate surrounding damages. This history reveals that many members of Congress had a discriminatory motive in capping damages …

The Seventh Circuit Got It Wrong: Supervisors Should Not Face Individual Liability Under Section 1981, Emily Aleisa

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In Smith v. Bray, the Seventh Circuit, on a case of first impression, determined that supervisors with retaliatory motives can and should be individually liable under section 1981 when they cause the employer to retaliate against an employee. This article argues against the Seventh Circuit’s holding for four reasons. First, courts are required to analyze section 1981 the same way they analyze Title VII, and Title VII does not allow for individual supervisor liability. Second, the Seventh Circuit justified its decision based on a flawed comparison between section 1981 and section 1983, a similar but distinct civil rights statute. Third, …

Leveraging Antidiscrimination, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

As the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns fifty, antidiscrimination law has become unfashionable. Civil rights strategies are posited as not up to the serious task of addressing contemporary problems of inequality such as improving mobility for low-wage workers or providing access into entry-level employment. This Article argues that there is a danger in casting aside the Civil Rights Act as one charts new courses to address inequality. This Article revisits the implementation strategies that emerged in the first decade of the Act to reveal that the Act was not limited to addressing formal discrimination or bias, but rather drew …

Retaliation In The Eeo Office, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This Article examines a new and as-yet unexplored development in retaliation law under Title VII and other anti-discrimination statutes: the denial of protection from retaliation to the class of employees charged with enforcing their employers’ internal anti-discrimination policies and complaint procedures. Through distinctive applications of traditional retaliation doctrine and newer rules formulated specifically for this class of employees, these workers are increasingly vulnerable to unchecked retaliation by their employers. This troubling trend has important implications for workplace retaliation law and for employment discrimination law more broadly. This Article makes two contributions to legal scholarship. First, it traces the legal doctrines …

Formalism And Employer Liability Under Title Vii, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Most lawyers, law professors, and judges are familiar with two standard critiques of formalism in legal reasoning. One is the unacknowledged-policymaking critique. This critique argues that formalist reasoning purports to be above judicial policymaking but instead simply hides the policy decisions offstage. The other is the false-determinacy critique. This critique observes that formalist reasoning purports to reduce decision costs in the run of cases by sorting cases into defined categories, but argues that instead of going away the difficult questions of application migrate to the choice of the category in which to place a particular case.

Values At Work: How Sex Discrimination Law Moved From Joke To Juggernaut In 50 Years, Kimberly A. Yuracko

Valparaiso University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Employment Discrimination Against Ex-Offenders: The Promise And Limits Of Title Vii Disparate Impact Theory, Tammy R. Pettinato

Marquette Law Review

none

The Use And Misuse Of Econometric Evidence In Employment Discrimination Cases, Joni Hersch, Blair Druhan Bullock

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Experts routinely criticize three aspects of regression analyses presented by the opposing party in employment discrimination cases: omitted explanatory variables, sample size, and statistical significance. However, these factors affect the reliability of the regression results only in very limited circumstances. As a result, valid regression analyses do not provide the critical guidance that they should in employment discrimination cases. Our own statistical analyses of seventy-eight Title VII employment discrimination cases find that merely raising these critiques, even if spurious, reduces plaintiffs’ likelihood of prevailing at trial. We propose that courts adopt a peer-review system in which court-appointed economists, compensated by …

Tortifying Retaliation: Protected Activity At The Intersection Of Fault, Duty, And Causation, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

In University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the Supreme Court broke its string of plaintiff victories in the eight retaliation cases it has decided since 2005. In its 2013 decision in that case, the Court rejected a mixed motive framework for Title VII’s retaliation provision, a part of the statute that Congress did not amend in 1991 when it adopted the motivating factor standard for proving discrimination under Title VII. For help construing what “because of” means in the retaliation claim, the Court looked to tort law, which it read as requiring plaintiffs to prove but-for causation …

Contesting A Contestation Of Testing: A Reply To Richard Delgado, Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

This article was written as part of an ongoing dialog about the author’s previous article, Does Testing = Race Discrimination?: Ricci, The Bar Exam, the LSAT, and the Challenge to Learning, which defended the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, as well as defending testing more generally against charges of irrelevance, racial obtuseness, and most seriously, race discrimination.

This article specifically responds to Richard Delgado’s article, Standardized Testing as Discrimination: A Reply to Dan Subotnik.

Race Indeed Above All: A Reply To Professors Andrea Curcio, Carol Chomsky, And Eileen Kaufman, Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

This article was written as part of an ongoing dialog about the author’s previous article, Does Testing = Race Discrimination?: Ricci, The Bar Exam, the LSAT, and the Challenge to Learning, which defended the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, as well as defending testing more generally against charges of irrelevance, racial obtuseness, and most seriously, race discrimination.

This article specifically responds to Andrea A. Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky, and Eileen Kaufman’s article, Testing, Diversity, and Merit: A Reply to Dan Subotnik and Others.

Let's Pretend Discrimination Is A Tort, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In the past decade, the Supreme Court has repeatedly invoked tort common law to interpret federal discrimination statutes. During this same time period, the Supreme Court increasingly invoked textualism as the appropriate methodology for interpreting these statutes. One immediate effect of these two trends - tortification and textualism - is to restrict discrimination law by tightening causal standards.

This Article explores how interpreting discrimination statutes through the lenses of tort law and textualism can expand, rather than restrict, discrimination law. It assumes that courts will continue to characterize discrimination statutes as torts and as deriving from the common law, despite …

Torts And Civil Rights Law: Migration And Conflict: Symposium Introduction, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Curiously, the connection between civil rights and civil wrongs has not been a topic that has captivated the attention of large numbers of legal scholars over the years. The distance that has developed between the two fields likely reflects their placement on opposite sides of the public-private divide, with Title VII and other anti-discrimination statutes forming part of public law, while torts is a classic, private law subject. To compound the division, both subjects are to some extent still under-theorized. Employment discrimination scholarship is often caught up in the process of analyzing the doctrinal implications of the latest Supreme Court …

Race Inequity Fifty Years Later: Language Rights Under The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

As Latinos have become the largest racialized minority in the United States, we should ask whether the civil rights laws of yesterday are equipped to address the race problems of today. Half a century after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial discrimination still exists, but it manifests itself differently. Rather than explicitly barring someone from employment, education, public accommodations, or civic participation on the basis of his or her race, racially discriminatory exclusion is often couched in seemingly race-neutral terms. English language requirements are one example of this. A sign outside a restaurant stating, “No Mexicans, …

Disabling The Gender Pay Gap: Lessons From The Social Model Of Disability, Michelle Travis

Michelle A. Travis

As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Title VII’s prohibition against sex-based compensation discrimination in the workplace, the gender wage gap remains robust and progress toward gender pay equity has stalled. This article reveals the role that causal narratives play in undermining the law’s potential for reducing the gender pay gap. The most recent causal narrative is illustrated by the “women don’t ask” and “lean in” storylines, which reveal our society’s entrenched view that women themselves are responsible for their own pay inequality. This causal narrative has also embedded itself in subtle but pernicious ways in antidiscrimination doctrine, which helps …

The Fundamental Nature Of Title Vii, Maria Ontiveros

Maria L. Ontiveros

This article explores the fundamental nature of Title VII and argues that Title VII is a statute designed to protect the right to own and use one's own labor free from discrimination in order to provide meaningful economic opportunity and participation. This conclusion is based upon three different types of analysis: the elements approach; the super statute approach and the human rights approach. The "elements approach" places Title VII in context and argues that it cannot be interpreted in isolation because it is only one element of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The "super statute approach" argues that Title …