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The Prima Facie Case Approach to Employment Discrimination
Get PDFEmployment discrimination litigation has increased dramatically during the past decade. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—Congress\u27 sweeping prohibition of discrimination in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin –older federal civil rights statutes and state counterparts to Title VII, courts have developed discrete, cognizable theories of discrimination. An analytical framework has also developed by which to evaluate the facts, innuendoes, and statistics that constitute the claims and defenses in a discrimination case. Within the generally accepted approach to the evidence, however, there is no consensus about the weight each element of proof deserves, or about which hurdles should be placed before each litigant. As a result, courts show varying blends of favoritism towards plaintiffs, skepticism of defendants\u27 justifications, and resistance toward certain forms of proof. In Maine Human Rights Commission v. City of Auburn, a sex discrimination case, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court (the Law Court) detailed its conception of the analytical framework applicable under the fair employment provisions of the Maine Human Rights Act. The court also discussed extensively the substantive evidence that is appropriate under the three principal theories of employment discrimination: disparate treatment, pattern-or-practice, and disparate impact. In doing so, the court relied on federal case law developed under Title VII in an attempt to provide for courts and future litigants a comprehensive overview of the proper approach to the evidence in discrimination cases. Thus, City of Auburn may be divided into two basic parts. The first is a discussion of the three-stage analytic approach to the evidence, known as prima facie case analysis. The second part provides an analysis of how prima facie case methodology applies to the three discrimination theories, including a survey of the evidentiary showings required from plaintiff and defendant for each. This Note will analyze City of Auburn to assess how accurately the Maine court has expressed the generally accepted tenets of federal discrimination law, to discover where the Law Court\u27s views of unresolved issues place it on the spectrum of plaintiff-oriented/defense-oriented courts, and to scrutinize the application of those views to the facts of the case
Stare Decisis
Get PDFStare decisis, a doctrine fundamental to common law decisionmaking, requires a court to resolve disputes within the framework provided by the rationales and results of prior cases addressed to similar legal and factual relations. It seeks to reconcile the law\u27s two great warring imperatives, that which requires a rational scheme of consistent authority serving the broad social goals of predictability, uniformity, and finality, with that which demands individual results informed by principle and applied with flexibility and discretion—in a word, justice. On the one hand, by focusing on how legal theory has interacted with fact on correlative earlier occasions the doctrine begets constancy and neutrality and thus constrains the judicial impulse to make law. Yet on the other hand, stare decisis recognizes that unquestioning loyalty to precedent invites stagnation; accordingly, it commands that courts depart from otherwise governing precedent when adherence would disserve the ends of fairness or rational judgment. The doctrine of stare decisis requires of a court that would accommodate these tensions a certain resolute suppleness, the hallmark of a truly principled process of decisionmaking
Property Offenses
Get PDFThe Criminal Code has sought to accomplish three goals in the area of property crimes: consolidation, simplicity, and consistency in the treatment of similar offenses. The consolidation of a variety of previously separate crimes into the single crime of theft may be the most drastic change from prior law in the entire Code. Almost all of the ways in which a person may be deprived of his property or services to the gain of another are now included in this single crime. The consolidation under the heading of burglary of a variety of crimes involving entry of buildings in combination with particular criminal intent (ordinarily theft) has resulted in greater ease in charging, fewer elements, and a fully justified expansion of conduct considered criminal. The more serious and comprehensive treatment of crimes involving the destruction of property is at last a recognition that this type of conduct is at least as detrimental to the victim and the community as theft
