A Case of Unexamined Assumptions: The Use and Misuse of the Statistical Analysis of Castaneda/Hazelwood in Discrimination Litigation
Year: 1983
Type: article
Abstract: In Castaneda v. Partidai the Supreme Court of the United States for the first time used formal statistical methods to determine whether data showing an underrepresentation of a particular ethnic group among persons selected to serve on grand juries supported an inference of discrimination against that group in violation of the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution.Later the same term, the Court applied the particular statistical test used in Castaneda to issues of racial discrimination in employment in Hazelwood School District v. United States, 2 a case brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.$The analytic approach adopted in the Castaneda and Hazelwood cases consists of the use of a particular statistical model to calculate both the "expected" results of an ethnically or racially neutral system and the likelihood of seeing differences from those expected results as large or larger than those actually observed.If the observed differences, considered in relation to the size of the sample to which they refer, are of such a magnitude *
Source: bepress Legal Repository
Authors: Thomas J. Sugrue, William B. Fairley
Institution: Boston College
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W18197230