Ilana Redstone (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Department of Sociology) has posted The Unintended Consequences of Griggs V. Duke Power on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
When the Supreme Court decided Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971, the justices gave power to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They also institutionalized a fundamental redefinition of discrimination itself—from intentional differential treatment to any practice producing disparate racial outcomes. This analysis traces how that redefinition, backed by Supreme Court authority, spread across American institutional life through voluntary adoption and created frameworks that now govern corporate hiring, campus speech, and political discourse. While this transformation emerged from laudable intentions to address hidden bias, it has created systems that undermine individual responsibility, due process, and democratic deliberation by making moral disagreement about equality policies effectively illegitimate. Recent executive attempts to reverse these frameworks through administrative action repeat the same error—substituting decree for the democratic conversation such fundamental changes require. The question we face now is: Was the price of advancing the Civil Rights Movement the institutionalization of a deeply polarizing moral principle?