Before you click the link, guess: who wins the $200,000? Was your guess right? Were other guesses just as plausible? And where does race fit in?
More: Coyote (“Here is a real journalistic triumph — the story of a multi-party conflict in which I immediately dislike absolutely everyone in the story on all sides of the conflict, up to and including the jury and the third parties quoted.”) And Scott Greenfield.
“Lawyers said a ‘new breed’ of serial litigators was pouncing on ‘errors’ in job adverts, particularly referring to age, and taking advantages of weaknesses in the tribunal set-up to pursue discrimination claims.” One woman “was alleged to have made up to £100,000 from complaining that 22 companies had discriminated against her”, and even busier was a man who, according to one of his adversaries, was discovered to have filed around 50 complaints, many successful. A Law Society official dismissed talk of reform, saying, “Protecting employers who are not aware of the law is not a priority for the tribunals.” [Telegraph]
The suit mentioned earlier does raise the question: under California’s stringent anti-discrimination Unruh Act, does the entertainer really count as a “business establishment”?
Or what passes by that name: lawyers for the ACLU say the design of a Milwaukee highway project is unfair to minorities (Rick Esenberg, Prawfsblawg; complaint, PDF, at WisPolitics.com).
Progressive members of the City Council of Binghamton New York have expanded the boundaries of civil rights in their fair city to include protection for citizens on the basis of sexual orientation, nothing shocking in a university town. What is surprising is that the law also protects Binghamton citizens from discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public accommodation on the basis of height and weight. Presumably in the future, Binghamton bean poles will have to yield to their shorter peers for slots on basketball teams, and the horizontally expansive will be able to demand wider doors and sturdier seats in restaurants and shops.
According to the law’s chief proponent, Binghamton Council member Sean Massey, it is a “sad fact” that a law protecting the undertall or the overweight is necessary, and even if it isn’t, “It’s simply the right thing to do. … It is the human thing to do.”
While it’s not at all clear to me, from a simple google search, that Binghamton was experiencing a tide of discrimination against the short, the tall, the fat, or the cadaverous before the passage of this law, it’s also unclear how this law will in fact promote its author’s vision of Harrison Bergeronlike equality of outcome for people of nonstandard body configuration. Will morbidly obese firemen be able to sue the city for discrimination if they are not provided assistance in climbing ladders and carrying victims? Will students whose body mass makes them unappealing by conventional standards of good looks now demand appointment as homecoming kings and queens on the ground that they are denied a fair shot in student elections? And how, exactly, will the city determine that someone was denied housing on the basis of height or weight? While one assumes that signs reading “Fat people need not apply” are being removed from apartments all over Binghamton, apart from that what does this accomplish, other than making the Binghamton City Council feel good? Gannett: “Council Passes Rights Law”, Weekly Standard: “The Politics of Fat”, thanks to dispatches from TJICistan for the pointer.
“In what appears to be the first legal action of its kind, an association of community-based organizations has filed a federal civil rights complaint against two of the three largest Wall Street ratings agencies, charging that their inflated ratings on subprime mortgage bonds disproportionately caused financial harm to African American and Latino home buyers.” (Kenneth Harney, Washington Post, Nov. 29; Hans Bader, CEI “Open Market”, Nov. 30).
P.S. Mickey Kaus (permalinks gone again, scroll to Dec. 1):
Hmmm. Didn’t community-based organizations push for exactly this sort of reverse-redlining? I think they did. It’s one thing to argue that they maybe weren’t the major cause of the subprime meltdown. It’s another for them to pose as victims wronged by the very system they worked hard to set up (including the securitization that enabled banks to keep up “reverse redlining”).
I’m scheduled to discuss the eHarmony settlement and litigation between 3 and 3:30 Central on the PrimeTime Chicago show on WMBI Friday.
“Online dating service eHarmony has agreed to create a new website for gays and lesbians as part of a settlement with a gay man in New Jersey, the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General said on Wednesday.” (Reuters, Nov. 19, FoxNews.com)(via Friedersdorf, see also Mataconis, Sullum, Balko). Earlier coverage: Jun. 1 and Jun. 8, 2007; Mar. 26, 2006 (married man wants listing). More: lawyer in parallel California suit against eHarmony says it isn’t moot despite policy change because they still want money.
Note: headline changed 11/21 to reflect commenter’s observation that despite the usage in the news articles, the civil rights proceedings in question had not reached the formal status of a lawsuit.