Question

In Ricci v. DeStefano, Ricci, a white firefighter, took and passed the City of New Haven firefighter's test, required of all applicants for promotion in the city's fire department. The test was thrown out when it was discovered that minorities scored poorly and the city feared a disparate impact-based lawsuit. How did the court rule?
A) An employer may not simply disregard a test based on unwanted results unless the test is shown to be biased or deficient.
B) Even though the test was prepared by a professional testing organization, the city has the right to reject the test results if minorities do not score adequately
C) Deliberately oversampling minorities to seek to create a fair test is irrelevant if the test results show that minorities still scored poorly
D) Ricci, as a member of the white majority, had no grounds to sue when the city was seeking the legitimate aim of nondiscrimination

Answer 1

Answer:

The correct answer is A. In Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court ruled that an employer may not simply disregard a test based on unwanted results unless the test is shown to be biased or deficient.

Explanation:

Ricci v. DeStefano is a Supreme Court ruling of 2009, after a lawsuit by nineteen firefighters who claimed to have been discriminated against in terms of career development.  They denounced that they had been discriminated after having passed the admission tests and still had not been promoted, since no African-American candidate had passed the tests. They also denounced that they had not been promoted because the Fire Department did not want to promote a group of new recruits without including within it any member of racial minorities.

Finally, the Supreme Court established that said procedure violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, since in the case equal access to employment was not guaranteed (in this case, favoring minorities over white firefighters), for set different demands for purely racial reasons.