Employment Discrimination

Students will be better prepared for professional life if they leave law school with an ability to conceptualize legal theory, a sensitivity to the contexts in which legal rules operate and a concrete understanding of the lawyer's role as a professional problem solver. While retaining the methods used in traditional legal education, this text uses numerous exercises designed to engage students beyond the realm of traditional legal reasoning and to develop a core skill set crucial to employment discrimination attorneys.

Employment Discrimination: A Context and Practice Casebook asks students to view legal problems through different lenses, from the perspective of a plaintiff's lawyer, a judge, an in-house counsel, a defense attorney, a victim of discrimination, a person accused of discrimination, a human resources professional, and an employer. It helps students gain an understanding of what each of these individuals might consider in resolving a legal problem. The exercises' fact patterns involve both litigation and transactional contexts to help students understand the multi-faceted roles of employment discrimination attorneys.

Perhaps most importantly, this book also tries to help students understand how the policy and theory underlying discrimination law affect the doctrine. The book contains numerous problems challenging students to question the underlying theory of American employment discrimination law and to consider how the law might work differently if it were based on a different set of theoretical assumptions.

One of the highlights of the text is the Capstone Experience. The Capstone Experience gives students an opportunity to combine the theoretical, doctrinal, historical, and practical knowledge they have gained throughout the casebook and to use that knowledge to resolve real-world problems. The Capstone Experience provides five different exercises, each focusing on a different skill set.

This book is part of the Context and Practice Series, edited by Michael Hunter Schwartz, Professor of Law and Dean of the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific.

"Thus, in addition to promoting traditional legal reading and analysis skills, the casebook also aims to promote the ability to conceptualize legal theory, sensitivity to the contexts in which legal rules operate, and understanding of the lawyer's role as a professional problem solver through background reading on the history, theory, policy, and practical considerations that have impacted the law's development and the outcome of particular cases and by emphasizing the importance of statutory interpretation alongside case law." — Book News Inc.