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Showing posts from July, 2011

Wal-Mart v. Dukes

Yeah, so I've been a little lax in my blogging.  Anyway, in the past Supreme Court term, the Court decided that the nationwide class of female employees who filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart did not constitute a certifiable class.  Dahlia Lithwick at Slate  had the most entertaining line about it : " Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, seems to have figured out that the key to low-cost discrimination lies in discriminating on a massive scale."  I express no opinion on the merits of the lawsuit, except to note that, while one may be sympathetic to Lithwick's outrage, the fact of the matter is that employers are generally given the benefit of the doubt in employer discrimination cases.  Viewed in the context of employment law as a whole, the ruling is not as outrageous as it might first appear.  Again, this is not to say it was correctly (or incorrectly) decided.