Probing the Discriminatory Effects of Employee Selection Procedures with Disparate Impact Analysis Under Title VII

Last term the Supreme Court handed down three decisions in which it defined with some precision the proper use of statistics in Title VII cases. Those decisions filled a void that had existed since Griggs v. Duke Power Co., but they left some questions unanswered. In this article Professor Shoben discusses those decisions and addresses the issues still unresolved. She proposes a structured framework for the systematic analysis of disparate impact cases that is consistent with, yet builds upon, the three recent decisions. In addition, Professor Shoben considers whether allowing a plaintiff to establish a prima facie case with statistics alone violates the Act\u27s guarantee that it does not require preferential hiring