The Litigation Process in Government-Initiate Employment Discrimination Suits

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract The Litigation Process in Government-Initiated Employment Discrimination Suits Over the past 35 years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has been an active repeat litigant in the U.S. courts, filing several hundred cases each year against private employers and seeking monetary and injunctive relief to benefit aggrieved employees. As the federal agency charged with enforcing laws forbidding sex, race, age, religion and disability discrimination by employers, the EEOC is a major political actor, influencing policy in a variety of ways, including its enforcement litigation. This project will collect and analyze data on federal district court litigation brought between 1997 and 2007, in order to better understand the EEOC's negotiated and litigated outcomes in the federal district courts and to develop and test models of the litigation process at the trial court level. This study will advance understanding in two specific areas. First, it will examine the EEOC's litigation choices and the outcomes the agency achieves through litigation. The investigators will analyze the contours of monetary and injunctive relief sought and obtained by the Commission in court cases, as well as trends in the nature of relief sought over time. This analysis will contribute to the theoretical debates about the continuing relevance of institutional reform litigation as a practice and about remedial design in employment discrimination disputes. Second, the EEOC's docket is an ideal laboratory for studying litigation dynamics and the interaction between litigant and judicial decision-making. This project aims to correct deficiencies in the existing literature by: (1) focusing on the understudied district courts, which handle the bulk of federal court litigation; (2) avoiding selection bias by examining both settled and litigated cases, and both non-appealed and appealed judgments; and (3) modeling the litigation process dynamically, taking into account both litigant behavior and judicial decision-making, and their interactions over time. This project will also have a broader impact because systematically obtained documents and data about the EEOC's enforcement activities will be made publicly available on the internet in both database form useable by future researchers and in a recently established web archive, the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse (http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu) which is designed for easy use by non-technicians. Through the Clearinghouse, scholars, educators, litigants and policy-makers will have web access to a variety of primary documents of importance in understanding civil rights injunctions and the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.