Parents’ discrimination against their children is lawful. But the family, as an institution in which social goods are allocated, is as significant as the sites in which anti-discrimination law operates. At least prima facie, therefore, parents should be governed by legal prohibitions on discrimination. While state incursion into family life poses a threat to children’s autonomy, so does parental discrimination against children. Anti-discrimination law therefore needs new institutions to promote the values of non-discrimination in a part of society that currently sits outside anti-discrimination law’s reach. We identify existing regimes that may provide a starting point for this work.

At first glance, Part 3–1 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) seems to overlap with long-established anti-discrimination laws, offering protection against adverse, attribute-based conduct in employment. On close analysis, however, it turns out to be a new and quite different regime. Although the Fair Work Act offers a simple alternative to dated and complicated anti-discrimination laws, its provisions are at times overly-simple, raising uncertainty about how they will operate. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the approach to discrimination protection in the Fair Work Act, while an important addition to the remedies available to Australian workers, is compromised by failing to take account of lessons learned in the long history of anti-discrimination law.

The year 2000 marked the birth of EU anti-discrimination law as a field in its own right, with the adoption of two major Equality Directives. They extended the prohibition of discrimination with five additional grounds and expanded the material scope of equality regulation. Having reached its eighteenth birthday in the year 2018, EU anti-discrimination law can now celebrate its adulthood and deserves a bird’s eye exploration of its achievements, failures, and prospects. The present Article provides this exploration by zooming in on these twin Directives, as well as on the “new” grounds of discrimination planted therein, namely race and ethnicity—the grounds introduced by the Race Equality Directive—religion, sexual orientation, age, and disability—the grounds introduced by Framework Equality Directive—and the related jurisprudence of European courts. It first outlines the genesis and main stages in the development of EU anti-discrimination law, followed by a discussion of major normative and practical themes emerging in EU anti-discrimination law after 2000, such as the personal and material scope of the Directives, new forms of discrimination, mechanisms to counteract discrimination, and the proceduralization of EU anti-discrimination law.

In many jurisdictions the list of factors for which anti-discrimination law applies has been expanded to include sexual orientation. As a result, moral and legal difficulties have arisen for religious organizations whose basic beliefs include the belief that sexual acts between persons of the same sex are immoral. In light of these difficulties, is anti-discrimination law of this sort unjust? Recently John Finnis has argued that, as commonly applied, such anti-discrimination law is disproportionate and therefore unjust. In this essay, I critically examine Finnis's argument, and argue that, on account of the conception of disproportionateness that is employed, it does not succeed. So as to enable the argument from disproportionateness to succeed, I develop and defend a modified conception of disproportionateness.

On 16 December 2009, the UK Supreme Court held a state-funded Jewish school to be guilty of discrimination based on ethnic origin in the way it operated its admissions policies. The Jewish Free School (JFS), one of the top-performing schools in the country, refused a place to a thirteen year old boy, M., because it did not consider him Jewish. It is a fundamental tenet of traditional Judaism that to be Jewish one must be born of Jewish mother or to a woman who converted into Judaism prior to his/her birth. M.'s father was Jewish by birth, but his mother, who was originally an Italian Catholic, had converted to Judaism with the criteria set by a non-orthodox branch of Judaism. The School's admissions standards only recognized orthodox criteria for conversion as valid, hence deeming neither M. nor his mother to be Jewish.