“The trends that are described here have driven employment discrimination plaintiffs from our federal courts in unprecedented numbers. In the last few years there has been a shocking drop of nearly 40% in the number of federal court employment discrimination filings. This is even more dramatic, given the rise in charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).”
For much of my judicial career, employment discrimination cases “reigned as the largest single category of federal civil cases, at nearly ten percent of that docket.” Now, they are exceeded by personal injury, product liability, and habeas corpus petitions. Employment discrimination cases have been dropping as a percentage of the federal court docket every year since 2001. Interestingly, this decline is the steepest in those circuits that a nationally prominent plaintiff lawyer had “previously described as circuits perceived by the bar to be the most hostile to employment discrimination plaintiffs.” As Marcellus speaks in the play, Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” When litigants seeking to enforce this nation’s comprehensive employment discrimination laws feel the need to flee our federal courts—the very institution tasked by Congress to hear these cases — something is horribly amiss in our federal civil justice system.
Source: Hon. Mark W. Bennett. From the “No Spittin’, No Cussin’ and No Summary Judgment” Days of Employment Discrimination Litigation to the “Defendant’s Summary Judgment Affirmed Without Comment” Days: One Judge’s Four Decade Experience. 57 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev.685, 709 (2012–2013).
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