Employment Discrimination

Catalog description

This course considers legal prohibitions on employment discrimination. It focuses on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. We also discusses other statutes more briefly, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Legal readings will be supplemented by materials from history, psychology, philosophy, economics, and literature. The course will address topics including how to define discrimination, frameworks for proving discrimination, sexual harassment, affirmative action, and accommodation. We will examine questions including whether employment discrimination law should focus on protecting classes, eliminating stereotypes, or something else, whether the law should account for research from other disciplines such as history or psychology, and whether the law should forbid discrimination on the basis of additional categories.