This casebook covers all major aspects of employment discrimination law, including benchmark legislative, administrative, and judicial developments. Due in part to frequent updates and revisions, it has received accolades as one of the most comprehensive and frequently updated texts on the market. The 14th Edition continues this tradition by seamlessly incorporating all major legislative and judicial developments through July 2023, including all relevant decisions rendered by the Supreme Court in its 2022-2023 term. The major Supreme Court rulings were in Groff v. Dejoy and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In Groff, a unanimous Court expanded an employer’s duty to accommodate religious beliefs and practices under Title VII by ruling that the standard of undue hardship requires a showing that the burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business, including an assessment of the impact on the coworkers. Instead of having to prove only the incurring of a de minimis expense, an employer now must show the burden is excessive or unjustifiable. In Students for Fair Admissions, a non-employment case, a six-member majority ruled that the use of race in the admissions policies of the two defendants (Harvard and the University of North Carolina) violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourth Amendment. Applying strict scrutiny to the defendant’s acknowledged use of race in their admissions processes, the Court ruled that these programs failed both the compelling interest and narrowly tailored components of strict scrutiny.
