LibGuides: Employment Discrimination Law: Home

Introduction

What is employment discrimination law?

Employment discrimination law focuses on the protections for employees against bias and discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, religion, sex, age, and disability. These protections are grounded in an array of federal and state statutes.

Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated that both private and public employers could not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion, and sex. Mandates against age discrimination and disability discrimination followed. These federal laws form the core of employment discrimination law, but there are other federal laws, state laws, and regulations that come into play as well.

What isn't employment discrimination law?

Employment discrimination law differs from other workplace-related areas of the law include employment law and labor law.

Employment law typically includes:	Labor law includes:
definitions of employee and employer the employment-at-will doctrine employment contracts wrongful discharge employee rights such as free speech, privacy, and off-duty conduct duty of loyalty, trade secrets, and non-compete agreements compensation, benefits, and workers' compensation leave unemployment health and safety	labor-management relations right to unionize, strike, etc. collective bargaining

Researching employment discrimination law

There are many resources for research in employment discrimination law.

Primary authority

federal and state statutes
federal and state agency regulations, guidelines, and decisions,
federal and state case law,
municipal ordinances

Secondary authority

treatises
practice guides
law reviews
internet resources

Because employment discrimination relies so heavily on statutes, you may want to use an annotated code for your statutory research. Annotated codes give citations to cases and agency decisions that interpret and apply the statute as well as cross-references to other research tools. The statutory codes on both Lexis and Westlaw (both federal and state codes) are annotated. Westlaw tends to take a kitchen-sink approach to annotations, so nothing is overlooked. Lexis tends to be more selective in its annotations.