What, Exactly, Did the City of New Haven Fire Department Do?
To determine whether the Department violated the Equal Protection Clause or Title VII (including the portion of the federal statute that prohibits racially-based test-score manipulation), one must first characterize the nature of the Department’s actions in administering and then scrapping the promotion-eligibility test. One approach would be to say that the Fire Department was initially prepared to promote each of a group of three people based on performance on an exam but, upon discovering that everyone in the group was white, cancelled the promotions. If we look at the Department’s actions in this way, an analogy comes to mind. Imagine that a school decides to admit all students who achieve above a designated combined grade point average and S.A.T. score. Upon discovering that all of the qualifying students this year are East Asian in origin, however, the school decides to find a new test. Such action appears to constitute disparate-treatment discrimination and – if the school is a
