Legal Discrimination: Empirical Sociolegal and Critical Race Perspectives on Antidiscrimination Law

The topic of workplace discrimination has received considerable attention in both empirical sociolegal scholarship and critical race theory. This article reviews the insights of both bodies of literature and draws on those insights to highlight a critical mismatch between the assumptions of antidiscrimination jurisprudence and extant knowledge about discrimination in the workplace. Antidiscrimination jurisprudence assumes that most discrimination is intentional, that legal rights provide an effective mechanism for redress of discrimination, and that employers respond rationally to legal sanctions. In contrast, the empirical sociolegal and critical race literatures show that racism and sexism tend to be hidden within social structures, that there are many obstacles to the successful mobilization of legal rights, and that organizational response to law is characterized by symbolic compliance that is often ineffective. We conclude that because law fails to grasp the reality of workplace discrimination, it condones racial and gender inequality and creates legal discrimination.