Three students at Yale University laid the groundwork yesterday (Feb. 12) for what could become a historic reckoning on campus. In a class-action lawsuit, they sued the school and nine of its all-male fraternities for discrimination based on gender, the Associated Press (AP) reports. The lawsuit, brought by students Ky Walker, Anna McNeil, and Eliana Singer, seeks to ban fraternities…
Three undergraduate students are suing Yale University and fraternities at the university to force the fraternities to “gender-integrate.” The suit’s plaintiffs, students Anna McNeil, Eliana Singer and Ry Walker, “believed that the most direct route to prevent sexual harassment and assault—and to challenge the gender disparities in social clout and economic opportunity perpetuated by fraternities—was to integrate Yale’s fraternities by…
Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak & Stewart on Wednesday was hit with a new lawsuit claiming that it discriminates against female shareholders in pay and promotions, as an earlier case making similar allegations could be headed to arbitration. Tracy Warren, a former Ogletree shareholder in California, claims the 850-lawyer labor and employment law firm allocated “credits” that determine shareholders’ pay and…
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure generally require that a publicly filed lawsuit name all the parties involved. However, under certain circumstances, plaintiffs can avoid disclosing their name by filing a lawsuit using a pseudonym (such as “Jane Doe” or “John Doe”). Although the use of a pseudonym commonly arises in sexual harassment cases, some courts are reluctant to allow…
Researchers at Vanderbilt Law School have found an alarming disparity in the job satisfaction rates between recent male and female law graduates, as detailed in a forthcoming research paper in the Marquette Law Review. The researchers discovered that “recently graduated female lawyers are 19 percentage points less likely to state that they are very satisfied with their current job compared to their…
Any woman working in today’s corporate culture is no doubt familiar with the numerous excuses used to explain the underrepresentation of women in corporate management. A veritable cottage industry has emerged in the form of books and articles offering advice on the common mistakes women make that result in slowed career growth. The advice for women looking to advance in…
Did a national employment law firm botch the rollout of changes to its own arbitration program? That’s the claim of a former Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart attorney suing the firm for gender discrimination who is asking a federal judge to keep the case out of arbitration. Dawn Knepper, who worked as a non-equity shareholder in the firm’s Orange…
Universities and employers have a duty to respond to allegations of sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination. Many organizations conduct investigations before responding, and plaintiffs have filed gender discrimination lawsuits based on the investigations themselves. For one example, read coverage of trial about a Columbia University investigation here. Whether an investigation is so faulty or biased that it creates a legal claim…
The EEOC first convened its Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace in 2015 and 2016. The Task Force issued a report and several recommendations aimed at employers and the EEOC itself. The Task Force’s 2016 report foreshadowed many of the issues that would later become central to the #MeToo conversation. The Task Force chose to define harassment more broadly than…
In my legal writing class in my first year of law school, each student presented mock oral arguments and received feedback from classmates. Following my argument, I was told that I was “persuasive” and “well prepared,” but what resonated most was the handful of classmates who described my argument as “aggressive.” One classmate felt that I was “too aggressive,” and…