Unequal: How America's Courts Undermine Discrimination Law
Sandra F. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas
Abstract
This book describes what happens when workers file employment discrimination cases in federal court, Judges dismiss cases where supervisors grope women, call them whores and sluts, and repeatedly ask them on dates. Judges dismiss cases where supervisors use racial epithets against black workers. Judges dismiss cases where an employer gives an employee a negative evaluation because of her race. Congress passed discrimination laws that offer broad protections against workplace discrimination. Yet over the past several decades, courts have created ways to analyze discrimination cases in a way tha ... More
This book describes what happens when workers file employment discrimination cases in federal court, Judges dismiss cases where supervisors grope women, call them whores and sluts, and repeatedly ask them on dates. Judges dismiss cases where supervisors use racial epithets against black workers. Judges dismiss cases where an employer gives an employee a negative evaluation because of her race. Congress passed discrimination laws that offer broad protections against workplace discrimination. Yet over the past several decades, courts have created ways to analyze discrimination cases in a way that favors employers and disfavors employees. Judges have slowly built up a set of frameworks, rules, and inferences that govern discrimination cases that dismiss cases—instead of properly enforcing the laws. This book examines each of these rules. Many of them are contrary to both the text and the purposes of the discrimination statutes. They are also factually unsupported. While individual rules are troubling enough, when all of the rules are put together, workers have little chance of prevailing.
Keywords:
discrimination,
civil rights,
Title VII,
ADA,
ADEA,
harassment,
retaliation,
equality,
bias,
EEOC
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190278380 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190278380.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Sandra F. Sperino, author
Professor of Law, University of Cincinatti
Suja A. Thomas, author
Professor of Law, University of Illinois
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