DISPARATE IMPACT

Thomas Sowell on "disparate impact":

Much of the backlog of cases in our over-burdened courts has been created by the courts themselves, with adventurous judicial "interpretations" of laws that leave a large gray area of uncertainty around even the most plainly written legislation.

Nowhere is this more true than in civil rights cases.

At the heart of much of this legal complexity and moral angst is a judge-made theory that a "disparate impact" of any job requirement on different groups is evidence of discrimination.

That is why courts split along ideological fault lines in cases like the New Haven firefighters' case, where the crucial facts are not even in dispute. The only real dispute is over whether a test is automatically biased if different groups pass it at different rates. Apparently the groups themselves cannot possibly be different, according to "disparate impact" theory. Sowell again:

It is not that judges are incapable of seeing through the intellectual flaw in the "disparate impact" dogma. But that dogma is too central to efforts at social engineering to be given up for the sake of mere logic or facts.

Life isn't fair. Deal with it.