Articles

Author: Ralph W. Kasarda The United States Supreme Court heard oral argument today in Lewis v. City of Chicago. In this case, African-American fire department applicants sued the City of Chicago under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They claimed that a written examination was discriminatory when it resulted in Chicago’s decision ...

Author: Joshua Thompson The Supreme Court handed down its decision today in Lewis v. City of Chicago. The issue before the Court concerned the statute of limitations for disparate impact claims. Specifically, at what point did the statute begin to run — when Chicago announced the results of its test, or did the statute run anew each time ...

Author: Joshua Thompson Having had a day to reflect on the Supreme Court’s decision in Lewis, my opinion hasn’t changed much.  The most disappointing aspect of the case remains the Court’s silence on the constitutionality of the disparate impact provisions of Title VII.  Less than a year since the Court appeared on the precipice ...

Author: Joshua Thompson Pacific Legal Foundation is happy to report on a great victory for equality under the law.  In Oakley v. City of Memphis, the United States District Court for the Western District Tennessee, relying chiefly on the Ricci decision, held that a group of forty Caucasian and African-American police officers were discriminat ...

You don’t have to go to law school to know that a plaintiff must prove the elements of her case before she prevails.  But the Sixth Circuit has turned that basic legal premise on its head.  In Litton v. Talawanda, the Sixth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s ruling where a plaintiff received compensation for a … ...

In October, when Fisher was being argued before the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia was concerned with how the University of Texas determined it had “enough” minorities in each classroom.  He asked, “how does the University determine when classrooms are diverse? …  Do they go about, classroom by classroom, deciding how man ...

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, police monitored residents of Oceania for evidence of “thoughtcrime.”  In Pippen v. Iowa, a case that takes the concept of unintentional discrimination to dangerous new levels, that concept doesn’t seem too far away.  In Pippen, several black employees and job applicants filed a law ...

We’ve posted before on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) attempt to hold companies liable for using criminal background or credit checks when evaluating job applicants.  EEOC has alleged that such practices cause a disparate impact on minorities, in violation of Title VII.  As we noted, courts have not looked favora ...

In previous posts, we have explained how the Obama Administration has been exploiting disparate impact theory in unprecedented ways.  There seems to be simply no possible avenue for American businesses, schools, governments, or employers to avoid being dragged into a disparate impact lawsuit.  Can you screen employees for criminal histories? Nop ...