The laws against discrimination are so unpredictable that they might as well not exist. No sane person would spend this long fighting over a $50,000 violation.

I would love to interview this poor woman, but I bet she is extremely disappointed with the legal system. The lawyers collecting fees for litigating these unpredictable laws are the only winners in a case like this.

I think an implicit First Amendment concern, though not expressed as such, underlies the Supreme Court’s fairly strong language about Title VII not being “a general civility code,” and the willingness of many courts to treat a certain quantum of nonthreatening, noncoercive, purely verbal sexual comments as not sufficiently “severe or pervasive” to rise to the level of actionable sexual harassment.

Regrettably, that attitude is far from uniform, and has obviously not deterred the filing of claims based on minor joking and crude “shop-floor talk.”