Speaker Christopher Kleps, a professor at Ohio State University, discussed the ambiguity of employment discrimination law in front of students and faculty on Feb. 10. The event was the first of the Law and Society Speaker Series.
“Employment discrimination law, as written, is inherently ambiguous,” Kleps said.
According to Kleps, employment discrimination law “leaves a lot of room for judicial discretion” and it is often up to a judge’s perception of a case in whether or not discrimination took place. The premise of his talk started with legal constructionism, which is the legal approach he uses in his research.
“The law itself is socially constructed and constructed by specific parties in specific contexts,” he said, explaining that law should be looked at in terms of day-to-day operations as opposed to legal formalism, where cases are understood solely by looking at case law and records.
In the workplace, one in four Black or Latino workers have reported being discriminated against in the past year, a Gallup poll shows. Kleps introduced studies about the types of discrimination, given that they are more covert than overt.
“We have some great studies where we send out identical resumes with identical information. All we change is the names. One of the names is changed to be a stereotypically Black name,” Kleps said, explaining that these groups had a lower chance of being hired.
The same was true when applied to a study on criminal records. White applicants with criminal...
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