Category Archives: Discrimination
Erik Encarnacion, ‘Discrimination as Bad Faith’
ABSTRACT Courts and commentators often treat antidiscrimination principles as alien to contract law and expressed exclusively by civil rights statutes. This Article argues that the separation is mistaken on contract law’s own terms: a wrongfully discriminatory exercise of contractual discretion is presumptively a violation of the duty of good faith and fair dealing, a mandatory […]
Taifha Alexander, ‘Systemic Racism as Negligence’
ABSTRACT Stark racial disparities persist across societal institutions. People of color face disproportionate policing, harsher sentencing, higher rates of unemployment, and unequal access to education and healthcare. These disparities are not solely the result of individual racial animus, but of institutional policies that ignore the enduring structures of racial power. Rather than addressing these systemic […]
Juan Carlos Ibarra, ‘Racial Legal Entitlements and Heirs’ Property’
ABSTRACT Heirs’ property – land inherited by multiple family members, most commonly by intestate succession – produces disproportionate land loss for Black families and other families of color when outsiders force the sale of commonly owned land. Existing scholarship has documented heirs’ property’s racialized consequences and generated significant legal and policy reforms. Yet these efforts […]
Sommers and Cheek, ‘Noneconomic Tort Damages and Biased Beliefs About Vulnerability to Harm’
ABSTRACT The American tort system aspires to provide fair compensation to injured plaintiffs, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, religion, or gender. Recent experimental evidence from psychology suggests, however, that factfinders consistently judge identical harms as less severe when experienced by individuals of lower socioeconomic status (SES). People presume, for instance, that a paper cut hurts […]
Margaret Zhang, ‘The Haircut Cases Were Wrong’
ABSTRACT Why an Exception for Sex-Segregated Grooming Standards Undercuts Title VII. Employers in the United States have courts’ approval when they require women to wear makeup at work or to dress in a different (sometimes more revealing) uniform than men. Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s nationwide ban on workplace sex discrimination in the […]
Kevin Davis, ‘Inequality and the Regulation of Contracting’
ABSTRACT A long line of scholars and jurists have proposed to use laws that regulate contracting to combat economic inequality. This chapter examines the justifications that have been offered in support of these proposals and how they might be implemented in various areas of contract law. The discussion emphasizes that law may influence inequality by […]
Xiaoqian Hu, ‘The “Nuisance” Of Discrimination’
ABSTRACT Antidiscrimination law is in real trouble. People on the left attack it for being incapable of addressing structural inequalities in America. People on the right attack it for demonizing and reversely discriminating against dominant groups. This Article focuses on the Fair Housing Act (FHA) as a major antidiscrimination law and takes the first deep […]
Francesca Lee, ‘A Critical Analysis of the Judicial Approach to Intersectional Natural Hair Discrimination in the UK: G v St Gregory’s Catholic Science College’
ABSTRACT Conventional anti-discrimination law in the UK, the Equality Act 2010, is governed by a single-axis framework which requires individuals to make a discrimination claim on the basis of a single category of discrimination. Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality reveals the existence of a distinct form of discrimination, intersectional discrimination, which is unable to be recognised […]
Holli Sargeant, ‘From Estimation to Discrimination: Algorithmic Bias, Predictive Uncertainty, and Anti-Discrimination Law’
ABSTRACT Machine learning (ML) systems, increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making, inherently produce uncertain outputs that can lead to unlawful discrimination. This article provides the first legal analysis of how predictive uncertainty in ML systems interacts with UK anti-discrimination law under the Equality Act 2010. Employing a decision-theoretic framework, the article distinguishes between aleatoric uncertainty, stemming […]
Michael Foran, ‘Single Sex Spaces in the Workplace Following For Women Scotland’
ABSTRACT In April 2025, the Supreme Court delivered judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. The decision restated foundational principles of equality law, provided an overview of the fundamentals of statutory interpretation, and reaffirmed the importance of both sex and gender reassignment as protected characteristics within the Equality Act 2010 (EA 2010). The […]