Employment Discrimination Law An Overview

Summarizes the provisions of those federal laws which prohibit employment discrimination: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), and the Equal Pay Act (1963).

Employment Discrimination Law is an innovative new skills-based text designed for flexible use. To add a skills component to lecture courses, it can be used in conjunction with traditional casebooks, and is also an ideal text for a free-standing practicum or seminar. Employment Discrimination Law functions as a "course in a box" providing readers with basic background law, including constitutional and statutory law governing the employment relationship; general drafting principles important to lawyers in any field as well as an overview of drafting issues specific to employment discrimination law; an introduction to the key research strategies and sources; an overview of the ethical issues likely to arise; and a solid preview of client counseling, negotiation strategy, and preventative lawyering. The text features a combination of text, sample documents, checklists, charts, and exercises. These well-crafted exercises, for students to complete individually or in groups, range from discrete questions to be researched and answered in a 5-minute small-group class session to much more detailed problems that could serve as final evaluative documents. Employment Discrimination Law is an innovative new skills-based text designed for flexible use. To add a skills component to lecture courses, it can be used in conjunction with traditional casebooks, and is also an ideal text for a free-standing practicum or seminar. Employment Discrimination Law functions as a "course in a box" providing readers with basic background law, including constitutional and statutory law governing the employment relationship; general drafting principles important to lawyers in any field as well as an overview of drafting issues specific to employment discrimination law; an introduction to the key research strategies and sources; an overview of the ethical issues likely to arise; and a solid preview of client counseling, negotiation strategy, and preventative lawyering. The text features a combination of text, sample documents, checklists, charts, and exercises. These well-crafted exercises, for students to complete individually or in groups, range from discrete questions to be researched and answered in a 5-minute small-group class session to much more detailed problems that could serve as final evaluative documents.

With contributions from top legal scholars, this edited collection provides an international overview of the most up-to-date issues and new trends in law regarding employment discrimination in different countries. Confronting the US, the UK, Japan on the one hand, with the EU jurisdictions, namely Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic on the other hand, this book pays special attention to the most significant changes to law in these countries and ongoing challenges they face. The monograph is complementary to a former one entitled "Discrimination and Employment Law: International Legal Perspectives", Joseph Carby-Hall, Zbigniew Góral and Aneta Tyc (eds.), Routledge 2023, and at the same time works as a separate volume. Adopting a problem-solving approach, this monograph offers an in-depth analysis of both anti-discrimination statutory law and of a growing and still developing corpus of case law. This book will appeal to students, academics and practitioners working in the field of labour and employment law, anti-discrimination law and human rights law, as well as to employers, employees, trade unions, the ETUC, the ILO, and policy-makers from all over the world.

It is no secret that since the 1980s, American workers have lost power vis-à-vis employers through the well-chronicled steep decline in private sector unionization. American workers have also lost power in other ways. Those alleging employment discrimination have fared increasingly poorly in the courts. In recent years, judges have dismissed scores of cases in which workers presented evidence that supervisors referred to them using racial or gender slurs. In one federal district court, judges dismissed more than 80 percent of the race discrimination cases filed over a year. And when juries return verdicts in favor of employees, judges often second guess those verdicts, finding ways to nullify the jury's verdict and rule in favor of the employer. Most Americans assume that that an employee alleging workplace discrimination faces the same legal system as other litigants. After all, we do not usually think that legal rules vary depending upon the type of claim brought. The employment law scholars Sandra A. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas show in Unequal that our assumptions are wrong. Over the course of the last half century, employment discrimination claims have come to operate in a fundamentally different legal system than other claims. It is in many respects a parallel universe, one in which the legal system systematically favors employers over employees. A host of procedural, evidentiary, and substantive mechanisms serve as barriers for employees, making it extremely difficult for them to access the courts. Moreover, these mechanisms make it fairly easy for judges to dismiss a case prior to trial. Americans are unaware of how the system operates partly because they think that race and gender discrimination are in the process of fading away. But such discrimination still happens in the workplace, and workers now have little recourse to fight it legally. By tracing the modern history of employment discrimination, Sperino and Thomas provide an authoritative account of how our legal system evolved into an institution that is inherently biased against workers making rights claims.

Presenting the issues of discrimination in employment in a multifaceted manner, this book examines the standards on anti-discrimination law for employment at international and EU levels and those deriving from national jurisdictions. Bringing together top scholars in the field of anti-discrimination employment law, this book explains the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the principle of non-discrimination in employment and assesses the most significant changes to law and ongoing challenges in the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Switzerland and Israel. Identifying emerging trends in anti-discrimination employment law, this book offers a comparative, problem-solving approach and an in-depth analysis of new developments in both anti-discrimination statutory law and case law. Addressing employment law with a focus on anti-discrimination law and human rights law, this book will be essential reading for students, academics and practitioners working in the fields of labour and employment law, anti-discrimination law and human rights law and offers an international comparative overview of the most up-to-date issues relating to discrimination.