Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Rethinking Civil Rights And Employment At Will: Toward A Coherent National Discharge Policy, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

America's employment discharge policy begs for reform. Although most states have created exceptions to the employment at will doctrine, the doctrine thrives. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VII”), which bans discrimination in employment based on race, gender, color, religion, and national origin, has proved ineffective in combating employment discrimination. Despite the statutory and common law exceptions to the employment at will doctrine, today's employees may have less job security than in the past. Although I applaud the Commissioners' efforts toward achieving justice in the workplace, I believe that abolishing the employment at will doctrine through …

Because I Am Black, Because I Am Woman: Remedying The Sexual Harassment Experience Of Black Women, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

This Note examines the intersection of race and gender in the context of sexual harassment jurisprudence. Since the arrival in this country of the first female African slaves, Black women have experienced sexual harassment on the job. This Note discusses the failure of sexual harassment theory to acknowledge the unique sexual harassment experience of Black women. From the very earliest discussions of sexual harassment, the impact of the race of the victim on the experience and resulting legal claim was ignored. Feminist legal theorists, leaders in issues affecting women, have been slow to acknowledge and integrate the role of race …

The Last Minuet: Disparate Treatment After Hicks, Deborah C. Malamud

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of this article is to explain why the Court's much-maligned decision in Hicks was correct, and to further argue that in the aftermath of Hicks, the McDonnell Douglas-Burdine proof structure ought to be abandoned.

Employment Discrimination: Recent Developments In The Supreme Court (The Supreme Court And Local Government Law: The 1994-1995 Term), Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Discrimination, Deceit, And Legal Decoys: The Diversion Of After-Acquired Evidence And The Focus Restored By Mckennon V. Nashville Banner Publishing Company, Elissa J. Preheim

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Handling Difficult Issues Under The Family Medical Leave Act, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Affirmative Action As A Women's Issue, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Structuralist And Cultural Domination Theories Meet Title Vii: Some Contemporary Influences, Martha Chamallas

Michigan Law Review

This essay first looks at three important theoretical approaches - motivational, structural, and cultural - that mark the scholarly discourses on workplace equality since 1965. The motivational or individual choice theory is well established and has dominated legal discourse throughout this period. I concentrate in this essay on the other two visions, dating structuralist accounts from the mid1970s and cultural domination theories from the mid-1980s.

Title Vii And The Complex Female Subject, Kathryn Abrams

Michigan Law Review

One strength of Title VII has been its capacity to accommodate the changing conceptions of discrimination and the self-conceptions of subject groups. In the first decades of its enforcement, advocates have raised - and courts have endorsed - a range of contrasting conceptions in order to broaden the employment opportunities of protected groups. This flexibility is particularly evident with respect to women.

After exploring recent doctrinal efforts to respond to complex claimants, I address these questions and assess the prospects of change. Although the unitary or categorical notions of group identity under which Title VII has historically been enforced might …

Employment Discrimination Law In Perspective: Three Concepts Of Equality, John J. Donohue Iii

Michigan Law Review

The essay begins with a discussion of which groups deserve the protection of employment discrimination law. With the protected categories of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act etched into the American consciousness, many might consider the appropriate categories to be fully self-evident. But of course, they are not, and many jurisdictions continue to struggle over whether certain dispreferred groups merit the law's solicitude.

The Michael Jackson Pill: Equality, Race, And Culture, Jerome Mccristal Culp Jr.

Michigan Law Review

This chronicle is in tribute to the work of Derrick Bell, past, present, and future. I have borrowed his character Geneva Crenshaw as part of that tribute, and I hope she helps me raise some of the issues that he has taught us are important.

All characters in this chronicle are fictional, including Professor Culp and Professor Bell. Any relationship they may have to the real Professor Bell and Professor Culp is dictated by the requirements of creativity and the extent to which reality and fiction necessarily merge. I know that the real Derrick Bell is wiser than the one …

Caste And The Civil Rights Laws: From Jim Crow To Same-Sex Marriages, Richard A. Epstein

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I address the notion of caste in two separate contexts: in the traditional disputes over race and sex, and in the more modem disputes over sexual orientation. In both cases the idea of caste and its kindred notions of subordination and hierarchy are used to justify massive forms of government intervention. In all cases I think that these arguments are incorrect. In their place, I argue that the idea of caste should be confined to categories of formal, or legal, distinctions between persons before the law. This more limited notion of caste supplies no justification for the …

No Time For Trumpets: Title Vii, Equality, And The Fin De Sièchle, D. Marvin Jones

Michigan Law Review

My essay seeks to examine the internal architecture of the discursive barrier - the wall - that the Supreme Court has built within the doctrinal framework of Title VII and concomitantly within the discourse of equality. To understand how the Court has erected this discursive wall, we must begin with history. Equality, while historically a vehicle for national identity and contemporaneously for modernist conceptions of justice, is synchronically and diachronically indeterminate. Equality is a deeply sedimented concept with not one objective meaning but successive levels of meaning built up over time. Each of those historic understandings is itself a unity …

Only Girls Wear Barrettes: Dress And Appearance Standards, Community Norms, And Workplace Equality, Katharine T. Bartlett

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I study both the judicial rationales and the scholarly criticisms thereof, agreeing with critics that community norms are too discriminatory to provide a satisfactory benchmark for defining workplace equality, but also questioning the usual implications of this critique. Critics assume that it is possible, and desirable, to evaluate dress and appearance rules without regard to the norms and expectations of the community - that is, according to stable or universal versions of equality that are uninfected by community norms. I question this assumption, arguing that equality, no less than other legal concepts, cannot transcend the norms of …

The Public Policy Exclusion And Insurance For Intentional Employment Discrimination, Sean W. Gallagher

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that courts choosing to apply the public policy exclusion to insurance for intentional employment discrimination liability should nevertheless permit employers to enforce insurance covering negligent supervision liability and liability imputed to an employer as a result of the intentional discrimination committed by its employees. Part I establishes a framework for understanding the cases in which courts have invoked public policy to refuse enforcement of insurance contracts, arguing that the rationale behind the public policy exclusion is utilitarian and that courts refuse to enforce insurance for liability arising out of intentional wrongdoing on the grounds that such insurance …

Employment Discrimination: Recent Developments In The Supreme Court, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Credulous Courts And The Tortured Trilogy: The Improper Use Of Summary Judgment In Title Vii And Adea Cases, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

Civil rights are under siege. In mid-1989, the United States Supreme Court decided several cases that severely limit the civil rights claims and remedies available to a plaintiff claiming employment discrimination. This Article examines the gradual and continuing erosion of the factfinder's role in federal employment discrimination cases and its replacement by an increasing use of summary judgment through which the courts make pretrial determinations formerly reserved for the factfinder at trial. This trend not only represents a major shift in court procedure and, in the case of age discrimination claims, a transfer of power from juries to judges, but …

A Unified Approach To Causation In Disparate Treatment Cases: Using Sexual Harassment By Supervisors As The Causal Nexus For The Discriminatory Motivating Factor In Mixed Motive Cases, Margaret E. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

This Comment examines a unified approach for disparate treatment mixed motives claims paired with sexual harassment claims under Title VII. The Author argues that because of the policy for nondiscriminatory and desegregated work environments embodied in Title VII, and because of the documented harm resulting from sexual harassment, courts should allow the burden of proof to shift to the defendant if the plaintiff demonstrates that her supervisor sexually harassed her, or condoned the harassment, and that the harassing supervisor made an employment decision that was adverse to her.

Critical Analysis Of Judicial Attempts To Reconcile The United States-Japan Friendship, Commerce And Navigation Treaty With Title Vii, A , Jeffrey J. Mayer

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

This paper offers a practical solution to the conflict between civil rights and economic growth through a new, but sensible, interpretation of the "right to choose" provision. Part I explains the conflicting rulings of the five Courts of Appeals that have addressed this issue. Part II concludes that the courts' various reconciliations between Title VII and the Japan FCN Treaty are, in each case, impossible to apply consistently or fairly. Courts have wrongly attempted to preserve the protections of Title VII for American employees of foreign corporations by asking factfinders to draw impossibly fine distinctions between permissible and prohibited criteria …

Putting The Teeth Back Into The Bfoq Requirement Of Title Vii And The Pregnancy Discrimination Act: International Union V. Johnson Controls, Inc., M. Chris Floyd

University of Richmond Law Review

In a resounding victory for women's and workers' rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has found that a Wisconsin battery manufacturer, in barring women without proof of infertility from jobs involving exposure to lead, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Law School Faculty Hiring Under Title Vii: How A Judge Might Decide A Disparate Impact Case, Norman Redlich

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Affirmative Action, Douglas Scherer, John Dunne

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pure Politics, Girardeau A. Spann

Michigan Law Review

Part I of this article considers the impact that judicial discretion has on the traditional model of judicial review, and that model's reliance on the Supreme Court as the primary guardian of minority interests. Part II argues that the interests of racial minorities can be better advanced through the ordinary political process than through the process of Supreme Court adjudication. Part Ill emphasizes that minority participation in Supreme Court proceedings cannot ultimately be avoided and, accordingly, suggests a political model of the Court that minorities can use in an effort to neutralize the Court's distortion of the political process. Part …

Bringing A Title Vii Action: Which Test Regarding Standing To Sue Is The Most Applicable?, Valerie L. Jacobson

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This Note examines who is a proper plaintiff under Title VII and explains the need for a clearer definition of "employee" and "employed." Part II presents a historical development of the standards used to define employment relationships in Title VII. Part III discusses the general requirements for standing and sets forth the tests currently used to determine standing for a Title VII action. Part IV analyzes how the tests can produce different outcomes and why some tests more adequately serve the Act's goals. The Note concludes that Congress should amend the definition of "employee" or at least define what constitutes …

Runyon Reconsidered: The Future Of Section 1981 As A Basis For Employment Discrimination Claims, Barbara L. Kramer

Cleveland State Law Review

On April 25, 1988, the Supreme Court ignited a controversy by announcing that it would reconsider' its ruling in Runyon v. McCrary, a landmark 1976 civil rights decision, in a case currently before the Court, Patterson v. McClean Credit Union. Runyon affirmed the right of certain minority groups to sue private entities for unlawful discrimination under 42 U.S.C. Section 1981. Patterson calls into question the origin of the present Section 1981. This Note discusses the elements of the controversy unleashed by the Court: the origin and operation of the present Section 1981 and its relation to Title VII of the …

Determining A Standard For Housing Discrimination Under Title Viii, Richard C. Cahn

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Civil Rights In Employment: The New Generation, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

In July 1989, Title VII was twenty-five years old. It is generally assumed that the first twenty-five years have seen significant changes in the economic opportunities available to America’s minorities and women. But with the rise to power of the Reagan appointees, the Supreme Court is clearly fashioning a new approach to issues of civil rights in employment. This article analyzes the new Court’s emerging themes and proposes a congressional response.

In Lieu Of Preclusion: Reconciling Administrative Decisionmaking And Federal Civil Rights Claims, Marjorie A. Silver

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Title Vii Remedies: Reinstatement And The Innocent Incumbent Employee, Larry M. Parsons

Vanderbilt Law Review

Congress enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 19641 twenty-five years ago. Through Title VII Congress sought to remove artificial barriers that limited employment opportunities for minorities. The statute is not limited, however, to prohibiting race discrimination. Title VII directly confronts the problem of discrimination in the workplace by prohibiting employment decisions based on the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of the employee or applicant. The Act prohibits an employer from favoring one group of employees over another due to irrelevant characteristics and classifications.

Title VII litigation occupies a significant portion of the federal docket. The …

Finding A "Manifest Imbalance": The Case For A Unified Statistical Test For Voluntary Affirmative Action Under Title Vii, David D. Meyer

Michigan Law Review

This Note analyzes the "manifest imbalance" standard developed in Weber and Johnson and the various approaches the lower courts have taken in trying to apply the test. Part I examines the Weber and Johnson opinions in some detail, and argues that the Court intended to permit affirmative action aimed at remedying the evident effects of past discrimination, regardless of whether the employer or society at large is to blame. Section I.A describes the diverging constitutional and statutory standards for evaluating voluntary affirmative action programs, and the policies behind the divergence. Sections I.B and I.C take a closer look at the …