From: "E. Allen Smith" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 1996 21:32:16 -0800 (PST)
To: ichudov@algebra.com
Subject: Re: Redlining
Message-ID: <01ICWJ1E2BX2AEL2O3@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From:	IN%"ichudov@algebra.com" 11-DEC-1996 23:46:57.12

>I would appreciate if some attorney on this list shed some light on the
>legal definition of discrimination.

	I am not an attorney by any means, but I have looked over the
Griggs vs Power decision (which effectively outlawed the use of most
standardized tests, such as IQ tests, for employment purposes). A means
of deciding on employment is discriminatory if the following are both
true:
	A. Under it, members of a protected minority do worse;
	B. It has not been shown to be _specifically_ relevant to a job.

Please note the second one; this means, effectively, that if you haven't
done a full study of people who have done the job and correlated their
performance with their scores on the test, it may be discriminatory.
You can't use the simple information that an IQ test score is correlated
with essentially all job performance measures yet done on any jobs not
intended for the mentally retarded. Obviously, this task can't be done
by anyone but the largest employers, and they are generally hindered
in doing so by:
	A. Being governments or government contractors, and thus
		susceptible to political pressure;
	B. Having unions which object to any job performance measures.

I'd appreciate any lawyerly comments that contradict me, particularly
in view of some later (and saner) Supreme Court rulings on the matter.

	-Allen

P.S. Please note that we cannot yet tell if the racial differences in
IQ are environmental or a mixture of environmental and genetic; I
believe they are purely environmental, but there is about as much
evidence for this belief as there is for God's existence (something
I also believe in).