The most curious element is not the alleged fight over a Scrabble game, but Sonya Glover’s allegation that she was retaliated against by being made to “perform heavy manual tasks normally assigned to males.” Isn’t there some sort of potential discrimination suit if tasks are normally assigned to males and a female employee is not asked to perform them? [NYDN]
Posts Tagged ‘discrimination law’
June 20 roundup
- Happy Father’s Day! Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy proposes criminal penalties for parents who skip parent-teacher conferences [WJBK via Welch, Reason]
- Plaintiff’s bar takes to online marketing in big way, Boston’s Sokolove firm has 20-employee team [WSJ Law Blog]
- Stuart Taylor, Jr., “The Myth of the Conservative Court” [The Atlantic]
- Happy Father’s Day, cont’d: that “sex offender” neighbor could turn out to be this poor guy [Stephen Mason, Psychology Today via Alkon]
- Libertarians debate anti-discrimination law [David Bernstein and others, Cato Unbound]
- Despite trial lawyer lobbying push, Congress declines for now to create “aid and abet” securities-fraud liability [Bainbridge] “Overcriminalization in the Financial Reform Legislation” [David Rittgers, Cato]
- As international “human rights” proliferate, they’re being applied for businesses’ benefit too, to some advocates’ displeasure [Bader, Examiner]
- Happy Father’s Day, cont’d: Virginia Supreme Court rules child can sue dad after traffic collision for not strapping her properly into car seat [OnPoint News]
“Too hot for Citi” complaint, cont’d
Radar Online reports that the complainant has hired Overlawyered favorite Gloria Allred, while Eric Turkewitz thinks Ms. Lorenzana might make not make the ideal client. Business Insider has more of the unedifying details, and Richard Thompson Ford explains (contra Deborah Rhode) “why lawsuits based on looks discrimination are a bad idea.” Earlier here.
June 10 roundup
- Compensation awards to soldiers in the UK: £161,000 for losing leg and arm, but £186,896 for sex harassment? [Telegraph]
- Judge in banana pesticide fraud case says threats have been made against her and against witnesses [AP, L.A. Times]
- Teacher plans to sue religious school that fired her for having premarital sex [Orlando Sentinel]
- Now sprung from hoosegow, class-actioneer Lerach on progressive lecture circuit and “living in luxury” [Stoll, Carter Wood at PoL and ShopFloor (Campaign for America’s Future conference), San Diego Reader via Pero]
- Connecticut law banning “racial ridicule” has palpable constitutional problems, you’d think, but has resulted in many prosecutions and some convictions [Volokh, Gideon]
- Gone with the readers: newsmagazines, metro newspapers facing fewer libel suits [NY Observer] More: Lyrissa Lidsky, Prawfs.
- Having Connecticut press comfortably in his pocket helped Blumenthal turn the tables against NY Times [Stein/HuffPo] Must not extend to the New Britain Herald News, though;
- Interview with editor Brian Anderson of City Journal [Friedersdorf, Atlantic] I well remember being there as part of the first issue twenty years ago.
Public accommodation laws
David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy recalls a 2006 lawsuit over whether neo-Nazis had a right to wear swastika pins in a Southern California restaurant against its management’s wishes, and extensive reader discussion ensues.
May 26 roundup
- Oh dear: Elena Kagan praised as “my judicial hero” Aharon Barak, ultra-activist Israeli jurist flayed by Posner as lawless [Stuart Taylor, Jr./Newsweek] Kagan and executive power [Root, Reason]
- More on efforts to get feds to redesign hot dogs and other choking-risk foods [NYT, earlier]
- Amid brouhaha over Rand Paul views, Chicago firefighter-test case provides reminder of how discrimination law actually plays out in courts today [Tabarrok, MargRev]
- So please, Ken, tell us what you really think of this Mr. Francis (“Girls Gone Wild”) and his nastygrams [Popehat]
- More on SEIU’s tactic of sending mob to banker’s home in suburban Maryland [Volokh and more, earlier]
- “Intensive Parenting Enforced: Parents Criminal Liability for Children Skipping School” [Gaia Bernstein, ConcurOp on a California bill]
- Julian Ku unimpressed with United Nations officials’ claims that Arizona immigration statute violates international civil rights law [Opinio Juris] Plus, a complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights [Kopel, Volokh] Ilya Shapiro analyzes statute’s constitutionality [Cato]
- Bill moving through Congress would force states, localities to accept unionization, arbitration for public safety workforces [Fox, Jottings] And here comes the giant federal bailout of union pension funds [Megan McArdle]
Combating “arbitrary discrimination based on appearance”
Stanford lawprof Deborah Rhode wants to get the law more involved (cross-posted from Point of Law).
“Legal secretary claims firm fired her for failure to meet unrealistic workload”
Legal secretary Nancy Topolski acknowledges that she couldn’t handle the workload assigned to her by law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, and that she suffered panic attacks as a result that prevented her from doing the work. But, she says, this just means that the law firm violated discrimination laws when it fired her. (Karen Sloan, National Law Journal, Mar. 24).
Diversity training’s triumph
It’s swept corporate America. Too bad it doesn’t seem to work [Drake Bennett, Boston Globe via Arts and Letters Daily] More: The Briefcase (Ohio) is reminded of continuing legal education (CLE).
Claim: underfunding of Chicago transit authority constitutes racial bias
Subsidies are better for the Metra commuter rail line than for the city subways, which carry a more heavily minority ridership, says the class-action lawsuit against the State of Illinois, the RTA and the Metra. [Jennifer Fernicola, ChicagoNow]