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In the 1960s, two landmark statutes—the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Acts—targeted the long-standing practice of employment discrimination against U.S. women. For the next 15 years, the gender gap in median earnings among full-time, full-year workers changed little, leading many scholars to conclude that the legislation was ineffectual. This article revisits this conclusion using two research designs, which leverage (i) cross-state variation in preexisting state equal pay laws and (ii) variation in the 1960 gender gap across occupation-industry-state-group cells to capture differences in the legislation's incidence. Both designs suggest that federal antidiscrimination legislation led to striking gains in women's relative wages, which were concentrated among below-median wage earners. These wage gains offset preexisting labor market forces, which worked to depress women's relative pay growth, resulting in the apparent stability of the gender gap at the median and mean in the 1960s and 1970s. The data show little evidence of short-term changes in women's employment but suggest that firms reduced their hiring and promotion of women in the medium to long term. The historical record points to the key role of the Equal Pay Act in driving these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the challenges faced by pregnant and working mothers in the United States labor force. It explores the historical gender discrimination that has hindered women's advancement in the workplace, as well as the disproportionate impact on mothers. The article examines the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and its gender-neutral approach, which has resulted in disparities for pregnant and working mothers. It also discusses the use of mandatory arbitration clauses in employment contracts and their negative effects on women employees. The article proposes exempting FMLA claims from mandatory arbitration clauses to achieve gender equality in the workforce and protect employees' rights. [Extracted from the article]

Even though the United States Women's National Team ("WNT") has been far more successful than the United States Men's National Team ("MNT"), the team members have experienced unequal treatment from the United States Soccer Federation ("USSF") since its inception. In March 2019, members of the WNT filed suit against USSF, alleging that it had violated the Equal Pay Act ("EPA") and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The complaint alleged that USSF had a policy of discriminating against the WNT due to their players' gender by paying them less than the MNT and providing them with lesser employment conditions than those provided to the MNT. A final judgment on both the EPA and Title VII claims was never given, as both eventually settled outside of court. We analyze the substantive legal and economic arguments made by both parties. We show that USSF's arguments in support of gender pay disparities were misguided and calculate what proper compensation to the two teams should have looked like from the 2015-2019 period of dispute. Although we frame our analysis in the context of the WNT lawsuit, our analysis has far broader implications for pay equity. We illustrate how the outside market force argument in justification of lower pay for women may often be incorrect. We illustrate how the traditional EPA requirement that an individual must work in the same physical location as their comparator to be considered similarly situated is faulty. This investigation is particularly timely and relevant in light of the substantial rise in remote work arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of ANNALISE E. GLAUZ-TODRANK, JUDGING JEWISH IDENTITY IN THE UNITED STATES (Lexington Books 2023) On September 28, 2023, eight federal cabinet-level agencies formally clarified, for the first time, […]

In 2017, following public outrage over the North Carolina General Assembly's adoption of the 'bathroom bill,' a retaliatory law that preempted a Charlotte antidiscrimination ordinance allowing patrons of public establishments to use bathrooms of their choice by mandating that public agencies and public schools require patrons use bathrooms based on their biological sex, the General Assembly passed a law forbidding local governments from enacting or amending ordinances regulating places of public accommodations until December 1, 2020. Since December 2020, twenty-four municipalities in North Carolina have adopted ordinances prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. And these local protections are crucial: North Carolina is one of just five states that does not have state laws regulating discrimination in places of public accommodation. This Recent Development proposes one for North Carolina. This Recent Development begins by describing the scope of existing federal public accommodation laws and discusses their crucial, but limited, functions. It then identifies how more comprehensive state laws compensate for some of the federal laws' shortcomings. Next, this Recent Development turns to North Carolina's local laws. It surveys the laws' definitions of 'protected classes' and places of 'public accommodation,' as well as the penalties and remedies each law affords. Drawing on this survey, this Recent Development proposes a comprehensive statewide law that retains protections for all classes protected under existing local laws, broadly defines what constitutes a public accommodation, and offers equitable remedies and the potential for damages. This Recent Development then addresses potential challenges to the suggested language, including concerns about the odds of enactment and, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the proposal's constitutionality. Despite these challenges, this Recent Development concludes that the proposed law is still worth introducing., INTRODUCTION In Borne v. Haverhill Golf & Country Club, Inc., (1) nine women sued a golf club for gender discrimination under Massachusetts's public accommodations law alleging that the club designed [...]

The 1972 amendments to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required employers to reasonably accommodate their employees' religious beliefs if doing so did not cause an undue burden, did not settle the ongoing debate about balancing an employee's right to practice their religion with an employer's right to run their business. One ongoing controversy involves whether an employer can accommodate their employee in such a way that the employee also must compromise on their sincerely-held religious belief. A recent Third Circuit case, Groff v. DeJoy, further added to the circuit split by holding that an employer cannot offer a reasonable accommodation that requires the employee to compromise on their belief--a circuit split which the Supreme Court has yet to resolve, even after it reversed the Third Circuit in Groff. The Third Circuit's reading of the statute is not in line with the plain meaning of the statute, nor the congressional intent behind such a statute. Instead, the courts should look with an eye toward the good-faith standard in labor law and hold that a reasonable accommodation is one offered by an employer in a good faith attempt to accommodate the employee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in university admissions, in which an applicant of a particular race or ethnicity receives a plus factor, is unconstitutional. This ruling was based on both the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This article argues that a more natural fit as the basis for constitutional analysis would be a different clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Privileges or Immunities Clause. In the article, a legal analysis based on the clause is applied to medical school admissions. Depending on whether a fundamental rights reading or an antidiscrimination (equality) reading of the clause is applied, opposite conclusions are reached on the constitutionality of affirmative action in medical school admissions. This analysis demonstrates why affirmative action in admissions--in this case medical school admissions, which directly affect the composition of the Nation's physician workforce--is a complex and difficult constitutional question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Significantly, these protected characteristics are undefined, and judicial interpretations of race, sex, and national origin have allowed employers to lawfully discriminate against proxies for these protected characteristics. This Note examines the use of race-based hairstyles, gendered-appearance standards, and citizenship as proxies for race, sex, and national origin, respectively, and how the availability of such proxies inhibits Title VII's goal of creating equal employment opportunities. The Supreme Court's dicta in Bostock v. Clayton County offer potential redress to some victims of proxy discrimination through a protected characteristic plus proxy framework, but its application is limited and authority still unclear. Legislative intervention is likely necessary to strike the proper balance between equalizing employment opportunities and preserving employer autonomy to make employment decisions. This Note proposes varying levels of statutory enumeration--broad enumeration, narrow enumeration, and no enumeration--for race, sex, and national origin, respectively, to balance the competing goals of creating equal employment opportunities on the basis of protected characteristics and maintaining employer autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ambiguity surrounding Title IX's requirement for "severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive" harassment in student-on-student sexual harassment cases. Topics discussed include the circuit split regarding whether this requirement necessitates multiple incidents of harassment, the implications of this split on victims, and the need for swift resolution to ensure consistent protection under Title IX.

This article explores the concept of creating a Bill of Rights for engineering students to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in engineering education. The author, a Black engineering professor, shares their personal experiences and highlights the need for better support for marginalized students. They propose that a Bill of Rights could establish minimum expectations for undergraduate and graduate education and provide a framework for accountability. The author suggests using Young's Five Faces of Oppression as a conceptual framework to outline rights that address exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. The article emphasizes the importance of implementing a Bill of Rights to address oppressive circumstances and hold individuals accountable, and suggests specific rights and accountability practices to mitigate oppression. The author encourages discussion and engagement within the engineering education community to bring about necessary changes. [Extracted from the article]

The Reconstruction Congress provided for civil rights removal jurisdiction to enable a state-court defendant with defenses based on federal civil rights to remove the case against them to federal court. A series of late nineteenth-century Supreme Court decisions rendered the provision practically useless until Congress invited federal courts to reinterpret the statute in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. New archival research reveals how lawyers at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement immediately embraced the tool, now codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1443, to shift from state to federal court thousands of cases brought against demonstrators and local residents seeking to exercise their federal civil rights. That brief moment came to an end when the Supreme Court reaffirmed its narrow view of the provision just two years later, and the statute has remained mostly dormant ever since. This Note argues that the utility of civil rights removal, as revealed in the overlooked story of its use during the Civil Rights Movement, should be restored through a modernized statute that clearly defines removal's role in shifting the power over forum choice to defendants when other forms of relief and review are inadequate to address the potential for bias against those raising civil rights defenses. It includes an analysis of court records for almost 5,000 criminal cases filed in federal courts in Mississippi from 1961 through 1969, including almost 1,200 cases removed from Mississippi state courts between 1964 and 1966. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the persistence of societal inequities despite the passage of the 1964 Civil Right Act in the U.S. Topics discussed include anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) activists' argument about the discriminatory nature of diversity efforts because they are rooted in equity, the University of Tennessee College of Law's initiatives to diversity the law school and legal profession, and the role of the public and private sectors in DEI efforts.

This document is a lesson plan for high school social studies teachers to teach about the geographic mobility of African Americans during the Jim Crow era. The lesson focuses on two travel guides, The Negro Motorist Green Book and the Automobile Blue Book, and explores active forms of resistance and "counter-mapping" by African American travelers. The lesson aims to compare the mobility experiences of African Americans to those of white travelers and generate mental maps. It aligns with National Geography for Life standards and provides primary sources for analysis. The lesson plan includes a hook activity, background knowledge, and a critical examination of mobility. The text also discusses the historical context and significance of The Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans published from 1936 to 1967. The guide aimed to help black travelers navigate safely and avoid discrimination and violence. It included listings for various establishments such as hotels, gas stations, and beauty salons. The text highlights the differences between The Green Book and the American Blue Book, which was intended for white travelers and did not address the needs of African Americans. The lesson encourages students to analyze primary sources and consider the geographic mobility and resistance of African Americans during the Jim Crow era. [Extracted from the article]

On January 28, 1942, the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) issued a press release on the eligibility for licensed female pilots to join the new Civil Air Patrol (CAP). The [...]

One of the heroes in American history, Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) sought legal remedies against racial discrimination in education and health care. As director of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) of NAACP from 1940 to 1961, his success in integrating law schools in Texas led to the first black medical student admitted to a state medical school in the South. Representing doctors and dentists needing a facility to perform surgery, the LDF brought cases before the courts in North Carolina that moved the country toward justice in health care. His ultimate legal victory came in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the decision that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In 1964, the LDF under Jack Greenberg, Marshall's successor as director, won Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, a decision that held that hospitals accepting federal funds had to admit black patients. The two decisions laid the judicial foundation for the laws and administrative acts that changed America's racial history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965 that established Medicare and Medicaid. His achievements came during the hottest period of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Well past the middle of the twentieth century, black Americans were denied access to the full resources of American medicine, locked in a "separate-but-equal" system woefully inadequate in every respect. In abolishing segregation, Marshall initiated the long overdue remedy of the unjust legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early development of employment discrimination law is often perceived as a string of important victories for plaintiffs, although the real story is quite different. Although there were solid victories, including the early creation of the disparate impact theory, the Supreme Court continually refused to adopt a more progressive judicial vision that had been percolating in the lower courts, a vision that imposed far greater scrutiny on employers and their practices. In contrast, the Supreme Court quickly moved from questioning the validity of employer practices to deferring to employer judgments, even when those judgments produced a workplace where Black workers were generally absent or holding the least desirable jobs. And as the first decade of case development progressed, the Supreme Court became increasingly worried about the plight of white workers, ultimately approving of seniority systems that effectively locked Black workers into the jobs they had held prior to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This Article explores the first decade of employment discrimination law’s development by looking not only at Supreme Court opinions but also at what lower courts were doing. Additionally, this Article incorporates insights from the papers of Justice Powell to demonstrate how the Court moved from a short-lived protective stance to one that seemed more focused on the interests of white workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With over 2,500 religions worldwide, cultural pluralism takes on an everincreasing role in the diversity cacophony: Social class, family and marital status, age, race, color, gender, sexual orientation and identification, ethnicity, language, etc., and veteran status. As such, this case study is systematically unveiled as Sandra Parks, a professor of human resource management, comes to grips with her own somewhat sheltered background and cultural experiences--some of which she now understands to be prejudicial and discriminatory in nature. As she puts HRM into practice, she concentrates on how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA, 1964), other laws, and sundry supreme court decisions impact such factors as religious observances, protections, prayer in schools and public places, etc., including what religious accommodations are in order in the workplace. In addition to researching key court decisions, such as Brown v. Polk County Iowa, she itemizes the 25 major religions found in the United States and chronicles them on seven major dimensions of religiosity: Rituals, rites of passage, dress, clothing, and grooming practices, and observance practices. The case concludes with a set of Questions and Instructions designed to foster a better understanding and identification of religious based discrimination in the contemporary workplace--whether public, plural, or private. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conditions for Blacks in the U.S. have improved slightly over the years, but parity with white Americans has yet to be reached, according to the 2024 State of Black [...]

The economic analysis of racial discrimination in public accommodations is remarkably limited. To study this issue, we construct a national data set of nondiscriminatory establishments from the Negro Motorist Green Books , a travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 to aid Black Americans in finding nondiscriminatory retail and service establishments. We document patterns in the geographic spread and evolution of Green Book establishments, as well as the correlates of Green Book presence. We find that economic and social measures, as well as state laws relating to racial discrimination and antidiscrimination, were correlated with the provision of nondiscriminatory services. We then use the Green Book data to test whether market conditions and white consumer discrimination led businesses to bar Black customers prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We use plausibly exogenous variation from white World War II casualties and Black migration patterns to isolate the effect of a change in the racial composition of consumers on the growth of nondiscriminatory businesses. We find that the share of nondiscriminatory establishments grew faster in locations with larger increases in the share of the Black population, but the magnitudes were small. These results highlight the importance of federal legislation in ending racial discrimination in public accommodations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twice in the Journal of Business Ethics, Walter Block provides a libertarian argument that The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unjust because it is a violation of a business's property rights and therefore ought to be repealed. No libertarian reply to Block has ever been given, creating the mistaken impression that his argument is the true representation of libertarian theory with regards to civil rights. This paper focuses on Title II and argues that both Block, and this prevailing opinion of libertarian theory, are wrong. There are different types of libertarian theory. Block's theory of natural rights is one of them, but there is another strain of libertarian thought that embraces the common law, at least as it existed up until the late 1800's. This paper explicates a libertarian argument, based on the common law, which supports and defends Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Specifically, the evolution of contracts via assumpsit arguments, found in Blackstone's Commentaries, endogenously and consistently gives rise to the obligation to serve all. Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is consistent with this common law tradition on public accommodations. Libertarian arguments that accept the common law on contracts ought also to accept common law doctrine on public accommodations and, perforce, the justness of Title II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]