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When “Best Practices” Win, Employees Lose: Symbolic Compliance and Judicial Inference in Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Cases
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
Abstract
This article provides a new account of employers' advantages over employees in federal employment discrimination cases. We analyze the effects of judicial deference, in which judges use institutionalized employment structures to infer nondiscrimination without scrutinizing those structures in any meaningful way. Using logistic regression to analyze a representative sample of judicial opinions in federal EEO cases during the first thirty‐five years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, we find that when judges uncritically use the presence of organizational structures to reason about whether discrimination occurred, employers are much more likely to prevail. This pattern is especially pronounced in opinions written by liberal judges. In light of these findings, we offer recommendations for judges, lawyers, and policy makers—including legal academics—who seek to improve the accuracy and efficacy of employment discrimination adjudications.
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- Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2015
Footnotes
This article is the third in a series of three deriving from the same data set. The earlier articles are: Edelman, Krieger, Eliason, Albiston, and Mellema, 2011, When Organizations Rule: Judicial Deference to Institutionalized Employment Structures, American Journal of Sociology 117 (3): 888–954 and Best, Edelman, Krieger, and Eliason, 2011, Multiple Disadvantages: An Empirical Test of Intersectionality Theory in EEO Litigation, Law & Society Review 45 (4): 991–1025. Data collection, coding, and analysis for this article, along with the two articles cited above, were supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 0651870) and by grants from the California (UC) Committee on Research and the UC Berkeley School of Law. Some of the work of data collection, coding, and analysis was conducted while Linda Krieger was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, while Lauren Edelman was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, and while Rachel Best was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. We thank the Discrimination Research Group, funded by the American Bar Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Ford Foundation for an invigorating exchange that influenced many of the ideas in this article. We also thank Aaron Smyth for outstanding research assistance. Authorship was fully collaborative.
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