Tagged: New York City Human Rights Laws

my Petition for Rehearing is scheduled to be considered by the Justices at their conference on February 19th!

supremecourtpetitionforrehearing

Here is my Petition for Rehearing & Motion for Disqualification of Justices Roberts & Scalia:

And here is my Petition for a Writ of Certiorari that was denied by the Justices on November 30, 2015:

“With the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Congress reiterated that ‘[i]t is in the interest of American society as a whole to assure that equality of opportunity in the workplace is not polluted by unlawful discrimination. Even the smallest victory advances that interest.'”

Nothing but empty rhetoric…

Source: H.R. Rep. No. 102-40(I), at 46-47 (1991), reprinted in 1991 U.S.C.C.A.N. 549, 584-85.

NYT: Hispanics in America are “Faring Better Than Blacks.”

Hispanics generally fare better than blacks in rankings of inequality in American life, according to a new report by the National Urban League to be released on Thursday.

The annual report, called the State of Black America, for the first time this year also included a ranking of income inequality and unemployment for 77 American cities that had large black populations and 83 cities that had large Hispanic populations, based on data from the American Community Survey, an annual survey by the Census Bureau.

“You can’t have a conversation about income inequality without talking about race,” said Marc H. Morial, the president and chief executive of the National Urban League. “Black and brown people are significantly being left behind.”

Nationwide, black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites (13.1 percent of blacks versus 6.5 percent of whites, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The rate for Hispanics was 9.1 percent. The report also focused on underemployment which includes those who are jobless and not looking or working part-time jobs but desiring full-time work. According to the report, the underemployment rate for black workers was 20.5 percent, compared with 18.4 percent for Hispanic workers and 11.8 percent for white workers.

The report ranked metropolitan statistical areas where the unemployment gap between blacks and whites was both larger and smaller than the national average. Unemployment levels include those who are actively looking for work.

Topping the list with the smallest employment gap was the Augusta-Richmond County area in Georgia, where 13.3 percent of blacks are unemployed compared with 8.5 percent of whites, and blacks in that area are about 1.5 times more likely to be unemployed than whites. Other areas where the gap between black and white unemployment was smaller than the national average included the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario region in California, the Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville region in Florida, the Las Vegas metro area, and the Chattanooga, Tenn., metro area.

The biggest employment gap was found in Madison, Wis., where 18.5 percent of blacks are unemployed compared with 4.4 percent of whites. Other cities with gaps that are larger than the national average included Lancaster, Pa.; Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, Wis.; the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, Minn., metro area; the Des Moines metro area; and Baton Rouge, La.

There were also differences in income between blacks and whites. The region with the smallest gap in median income between blacks and whites was Riverside, Calif., which also had one of the smallest unemployment gaps between the two groups. In that area, the median household income for blacks was $44,572 a year compared with $57,252 for whites. In the Twin Cities metro area in Minnesota, one of the regions with the highest gap in unemployment between whites and blacks, the median household income for blacks was $28,784 a year compared with $71,376 for whites.

There were no cities where blacks fared better than whites in terms of income or employment. That was not true for Hispanics.

In the greater Memphis area, for example, 3.8 percent of Hispanics were unemployed compared with 6.5 percent of whites. Jacksonville, Fla., the Indianapolis metro area and the Nashville metro area all had higher rates of unemployment for whites than among Hispanics. In Madison, Wis., where the gap between whites and blacks both in income and unemployment was significant, the percentages of unemployed Hispanics, 4.5 percent, was almost identical to that of whites. That city also ranked among the top 20 for income equality between Hispanics and whites, where the median household income for Hispanics was $45,514 a year compared with whites at $62,585. The area with the smallest income gap between Hispanics and whites was the Lakeland-Winter Haven region in Florida where the median household income for Hispanics was $39,434 a year compared with $44,014 for whites. The city with the largest income gap between those two groups was Springfield, Mass., where the median income for Hispanics was $20,762 compared with $58,549 for whites.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/us/report-finds-hispanics-faring-better-than-blacks.html?_r=0.

William Morris Endeavor Entertainment: “[You] may have been able to engage in intentional discrimination against African Americans for 116 years, but [you] won’t get away with it FOREVER!”

A comment made while talking to my dad today. Happy birthday!!

“Why are the federal courts so hostile to discrimination claims?”

Each year, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts holds an extraordinary panel. All active judges are present to answer questions from the bar. A lawyer’s question one year was particularly provocative: “Why are the federal courts so hostile to discrimination claims?” One judge after another insisted that there was no hostility. All they were doing when they dismissed employment discrimination cases was following the law—nothing more, nothing less.

I disagreed. Federal courts, I believed, were hostile to discrimination cases. Although the judges may have thought they were entirely unbiased, the outcomes of those cases told a different story. The law judges felt “compelled” to apply had become increasingly problematic. Changes in substantive discrimination law since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were tantamount to a virtual repeal. This was so not because of Congress; it was because of judges.

Decades ago, law-and-society scholars offered an explanation for that phenomenon, evaluating the structural forces at work in law-reform litigation that lead to one-sided judicial outcomes. Focusing on employment discrimination claims, Marc Galanter argued that, because employers are “repeat players” whereas individual plaintiffs are not, the repeat players have every incentive to settle the strong cases and litigate the weak ones. Over time, strategic settlement practices produce judicial interpretations of rights that favor the repeat players’ interests. More recently, Catherine Albiston went further, identifying the specific opportunities for substantive rulemaking in this litigation—as in summary judgment and motions to dismiss—and how the “repeat players,” to use Galanter’s term, take advantage of them.

In this Essay, drawing on my seventeen years on the federal bench, I attempt to provide a firsthand and more detailed account of employment discrimination law’s skewed evolution—the phenomenon I call “Losers’ Rules.” I begin with a discussion of the wholly one-sided legal doctrines that characterize discrimination law. In effect, today’s plaintiff stands to lose unless he or she can prove that the defendant had explicitly discriminatory policies in place or that the relevant actors were overtly biased. It is hard to imagine a higher bar or one less consistent with the legal standards developed after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, let alone with the way discrimination manifests itself in the twenty-first century. Although ideology may have something to do with these changes, and indeed the bench may be far less supportive of antidiscrimination laws than it was during the years following the laws’ passage, I explore another explanation. Asymmetric decisionmaking—where judges are encouraged to write detailed decisions when granting summary judgment and not to write  it—fundamentally changes the lens through which employment cases are viewed, in two respects. First, it encourages judges to see employment discrimination cases as trivial or frivolous, as decision after decision details why the plaintiff loses. And second, it leads to the development of decision heuristics—the Losers’ Rules—that serve to justify prodefendant outcomes and thereby exacerbate the one-sided development of the law.

Great article by Nancy Gertner [not a woman of color]. This is what happens when the federal courts have intentionally been filled with ideologically conservative, white male, Republican appointed federal judges, particularly since Ronald Reagan became president 34 years ago. Below is Gertner discussing this topic at the New York Law School’s Symposium titled “A View From the Bench — The Judges’ Perspective on Summary Judgment In Employment Discrimination Cases.” [go to the 38:38 mark]

Major reform is needed — not only to strengthen the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but to develop structural mechanisms that will eliminate racist and corrupt judges who intentionally ignore the law and deprive plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases of their right to a jury trial under the color of law.

Source: Nancy Gertner. “Loser’s Rules.” The Yale Law Journal Online. October 16, 2012.  http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-part/procedure/losers%E2%80%99-rules/

understanding why “arbitration stands in sharp contrast to litigation.”

Arbitration stands in sharp contrast to litigation. A trial is a public event in which a publicly appointed judge renders a judgment by virtue of the authority of the state.” Financed through taxation, the civil justice system derives its authority over civil disputes from the state’s power to govern. The judicial branch definitively applies coercive state power to issue judgment in a visible, unbiased, accountable, and rationalized manner.” Selected through a process based on public assent and indirect public participation, judges are public agents whose decisions are official acts.” The civil judicial system operates through open hearings, creates public records, and publishes reasoned decisions that explain the bases of judgments. Because their judgments and often the reasons for those decisions are part of a public record, judges are accountable to the public, to higher courts, and to Congress, which may amend court rulings through legislation. For these reasons, “[p]ublic justice is public in the most obvious sense.’

Arbitration is a method of resolving disputes by voluntarily deferring to the judgment of third parties who have been engaged by the disputants.’ Arbitration is thus a substitute, or alternative, for formal, public adjudication.’ In contrast to the public nature of litigation, the defining characteristic of arbitration is that it is a private system. Arbitration does not depend upon and is not authorized by state power. Arbitrators receive their authority to render a binding decision from the agreement of the parties to abide by that decision, rather than from state authority. Arbitrators are not officials of the state, but are individuals acting in a private capacity who are selected by the parties, commonly because of experience in a particular industry or knowledge of the subject at issue. They work within a privately financed system and are accountable only to the parties.

Arbitration is private in a second sense; arbitration and its outcomes are generally confidential. Members of the public may not attend the hearings, which are open only to the parties and their representatives. The forum does not create a public record of filings, of the hearing, or of the award. In general, the awards are simple statements of the disposition of the claims that do not provide the reason for the award or an explanation of the grounds supporting it.’ An arbitration award is virtually final because, although recourse to the courts is nominally available under the FAA, the statute limits the grounds for setting aside the arbitral award to egregious errors.

Litigation occurs within a unified, hierarchical judicial system that uses past judgments to govern future cases heard by different courts. Under the doctrine of stare decisis, courts do not lightly reverse prior decisions or interpretive rules. This system allows an appellate court to constrain the power of the trial court by reviewing the legal bases of decisions. In contrast, arbitration occurs as a unique, isolated event that is not subject to review. As a result, arbitrators neither create nor apply precedent.

Source: Geraldine Szott Moohr. Arbitration and the Goals of Employment Discrimination Law. 56 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 395, 401-403 1999.

current mindset: i get everything that i asked for or we go to a jury. one or the other.