From the IAFC: For the second time in less than two years, the U.S. Supreme Court took a close look at the application of “disparate-impact” discrimination law in a fire department. In Lewis v. City of Chicago, the court found that the city’s selection process using the 76% white/11.5% black well-qualified pool had a disparate impact on black firefighter candidates. The city attempted a business-necessity defense, but the district court found that the city’s “well-qualified” 89 cutoff score was “statistically meaningless,” and the city could offer no evidence that candidates who scored higher on the test made better recruits.
The city also argued that, under Title VII, a complainant had 300 days from the date of the “discriminatory act,” to file an EEOC charge and that, because the “discriminatory act” was the adoption of the eligible list on February 6, 1996, and the first complaint wasn’t made until after the first selection in March 1997—more than 300 days later—no candidate’s lawsuit could stand.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for a unanimous court, overturning the 7th Circuit decision. In a disparate-impact case, he noted, each use of the eligible list met the Title VII disparate-impact standard of a “particular employment practice that causes a disparate impact.”
Arbitrarily assigning test-score cutoffs without some evidence of relationship between test-score performance and workplace performance is risky at best. So is using an unvalidated test, where that test score/workplace relationship doesn’t seem to exist in the first place. And a department's disparate-impact complaint exposure is "renewed" each time that test's "eligible list" is used for hiring.