ACSBlog

by Fatima Goss Graves & Amy K. Matsui, National Women's Law Center

This week the Senate HELP Committee will vote on the nomination of Thomas Perez to be the next Secretary of Labor.   In the midst of the many unfair and unfounded attacks lobbed against Mr. Perez in recent weeks, an important legal doctrine for combating sex discrimination has also come under attack: disparate impact. Under Mr. Perez’s leadership as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, the Department has employed the longstanding disparate impact analysis to combat employment discrimination.  Its application is not only legally sound, but exceptionally important to eliminate discrimination and further justice.

The Supreme Court and Congress have long made clear that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “prohibits employers from using employment practices that cause a disparate impact” based on sex and other protected classes. The doctrine of disparate impact allows for a remedy when an employment practice that may be neutral on its face has an unjustified adverse effect on members of a protected class.

Disparate impact has been crucial to addressing entrenched discriminatory employment practices.  Indeed, women’s entry into high-wage, nontraditional occupations has been made possible in large part by challenges to unfortunate employment practices that disproportionately disadvantage women, which would have otherwise remained unchanged but for the Title VII’s disparate impact doctrine.  Courts, for example, have struck down height, weight or strength requirements implemented by employers in police departments, fire departments, in construction and in correctional facilities because the requirements were not related to job performance, but instead reflected stereotypes about the skills required for a position.  Moreover, there are often alternative practices that may both satisfy job performance demands and allow for a diverse workforce.

by E. Sebastian Arduengo

Last month, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D–Vt.) reintroduced the Gideon’s Promise Act of 2013 to address the problems plaguing the indigent defense system which have left the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright increasingly hollow for the poorest people in our society. The act would require states to use existing federal funds to improve the administration of criminal justice in a comprehensive, strategic way, and to collaborate with the Department of Justice and local authorities to devise a plan for adequately addressing indigent defense needs. If states refuse to comply then the Department of Jusice would have the power to take them to court to make sure that they are meeting their constitutional obligations.

But Leahy’s bill doesn’t go nearly far enough to address budget-related failings in our criminal justice system. With sequestration at the federal level, and years of budget cutbacks at the state level, we’re now to the point where years of political indifference to funding the judicial branch has affected the basic operation of the courts and the services that we expect them to provide.

This is a crisis that’s reached such endemic proportions that Chief Justice John Roberts made it a focus of last year’s state of the judiciary report, where he made the case that the federal courts were already being as cost-effective as they could possibly be, and warned that “significant and prolonged shortfall[s] in judicial funding would inevitably result in the delay or denial of justice for the people the courts serve.”

That scenario is already playing out in state and local courts across the country.

The effect of over a billion dollars of cuts in the last four years has been nothing short of devastating to the Los Angeles Superior Court system. Court officials plan to shutter a dozen courthouses and make an indeterminate number of staff layoffs. The only thing these courthouses will be used for now is for collecting traffic fines and administrative functions. The actual business of dispensing justice will be triaged at the remaining courthouses in the county, “where certain types of cases are heard at each remaining courthouse.”