The N-word… the B-word… the F-word… the C-word. They’re all incredibly offensive (as indicated by their censoring here.) Sometimes, one-time uses of certain slurs may be enough to satisfy the “severe or pervasive” standard federal law demands. With cases involving other words, however, you may need something more. To get…
Both federal law and New Jersey law generally bar disparate impact discrimination, which occurs when an employer’s action has a disproportionately harmful effect on people of a protected class. These actions may often target employer standards, practices, or rules that seem to be neutral but, in function, end up disparately…
Last spring, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sounded an alarm that called into question the fairness of hiring processes aided by artificial intelligence, pointing out that AI-assisted hiring has the potential to enhance, rather than alleviate, certain forms of impermissible bias. That risk remains an ongoing problem… one that…
We all face deadlines at work, and missed deadlines can be costly in any arena. When it comes to discrimination lawsuits, a missed deadline — sometimes missed by as little as one day — can mean catastrophic results for the worker harmed by illegal discrimination. Timely filings, in addition to…
In a 2007 case, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the “way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” While many — including members of the Supreme Court — disagree, his analysis serves as a reminder of…
We are currently only eight weeks away from the start of Ramadan (March 22nd.) Ramadan is the most sacred month in the Islamic calendar and Ramadan practices (such as fasting and fast-breaking, prayer, and reflection) represent religious observations of the highest order for Muslims. Here in New Jersey, the law…
Today, more and more workplaces are going “paperless,” meaning that they use as little paper as possible. Many of the records and documents that used to reside in hardcopy now exist as digital files or information stored in the cloud. While workplaces going paperless is often a good thing for…
In most employment discrimination cases, your employer probably is going to come armed with a great many explanations as to why the actions it took were legitimate and permissible. In those cases, the first step often is not to prove conclusively that discrimination occurred; rather, your first goal is to…
When it comes to matters of discrimination and/or harassment, we all know there are gradations. There are employers who violated the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination because they made an honest mistake when it comes to the law, such as misconstruing when the law demands that they accommodate a worker’s…
Generally, when one hears the phrase “national origin discrimination,” one immediately calls to mind discrimination against non-citizens or citizens of certain ancestral backgrounds (such as anti-Asian discrimination, anti-Latino discrimination. etc.) However, the full spectrum of national origin discrimination actually goes beyond that, also including incidents of employment discrimination where U.S.…