Overlawyered » language bias

“Hospital OKs Language-Discrimination Settlement of $975K”

Walter Olson — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:08:18 +0000

“Delano Regional Medical Center in Kern County defended its English-only policy as necessary for patient care.” Nonetheless, without admitting wrongdoing, it yielded to a complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center that it had improperly penalized Filipino-American workers for communicating with each other in their own language. The suit had alleged, among other things, that the hospital had been more liberal in permitting the use of other languages other than English, and that it had not prevented workers from making fun of accents and expressing ethnically-based hostility. [L.A. Times, ABA Journal]

Tags: California, Department of Justice, hospitals, language bias

“Hospital OKs Language-Discrimination Settlement of $975K” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

October 3 roundup

Walter Olson — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:13:55 +0000

Arizona officials say “accents were never the focus” of teacher fluency monitoring suspended at feds’ insistence [NYTNS, earlier] Reactions to my piece last week include columnist “Johnson” at The Economist (taking issue) and Hans Bader and Carrie Lukas (favorable);
Another highlight of new “jobs” bill: financial institution customers would help pay for auto bailouts [John Berlau]
Key New Orleans Police Department officer in charge of integrity of traffic-cam program accused of altering own plates [WWL] Red light cameras defended [Noah Kristula-Green, FrumForum] Why Massachusetts won’t raise the speed limit on Route 3 north of Burlington (NMA blog via @radleybalko)
Eight bad reasons for going to law school [Campos] Law schools have demographic but not socioeconomic diversity [Richard Sander, Denver U. Law Review via Legal Ethics Forum] And besides my own contribution on law school reform at the recent Truth on the Market symposium, check out the contributions by Hans Bader and Larry Ribstein;
Fellow federal agency FERC worried that EPA’s power-plant crackdown could lead to outages [WSJ] EPA’s plan to regulate dust from farmers’ fields led to public opinion blowback for President Obama [Diane Katz/Heritage, Environmental Legal Blogs, Radley Balko] Shutting down EPA isn’t likely under GOP reign, but reforming EPA might be [Adler, NYT "Room for Debate"]
Left rallies around New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman [Ben Smith, Politico]

Tags: agriculture and farming, attorneys general, Environmental Protection Agency, language bias, New Orleans, New York, red light cameras

October 3 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Faced with federal suit, Arizona quits monitoring teachers’ English fluency

Walter Olson — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:12:10 +0000

My new Cato post points out that while this may be craziness, it’s craziness with a long pedigree:

It was way back in the first Bush administration that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) began filing lawsuits against employers for “discriminating” against employees with difficult-to-understand or heavily accented speech, the theory being that this served as an improper proxy for discrimination based on national origin. The scope for allowable exceptions was exceedingly narrow, too narrow to cover most teaching positions, as I wrote quite a while back when the issue had just come over the horizon in a Massachusetts case. Indeed, the National Education Association (I pointed out) had been prevailed on to pass a resolution “decrying disparate treatment on the basis of ‘pronunciation’ — quite a switch from the old days when teachers used to be demons for correctness on that topic.”

Read the whole thing here (& Alkon, Peter Pappas/Tax Lawyer’s Blog, Bader). Another view: Josh Hanson.

Tags: Arizona, EEOC, language bias, schools

Faced with federal suit, Arizona quits monitoring teachers’ English fluency is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Teacher with poor English fluency appeals firing

Walter Olson — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:24:43 +0000

A dismissed teacher’s case against the school system in Lowell is now before Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court. Phanna Rem Robishaw, a native of Cambodia originally hired to teach bilingual programs, had received favorable evaluations for years but received an unsatisfactory rating in English fluency after the state began requiring that teachers be tested on that skill. An arbitrator reinstated her but a state court judge reversed the reinstatement, terming her performance on an interview test tape “utterly incomprehensible”. Robishaw’s lawyer says the arbitrator excluded the tape from evidence and that the judge should not have considered it, and that the judge failed to observe the presumption against overturning arbitration results. “In 2002, Massachusetts’ voters passed Question 2, requiring all school superintendents to attest to the English fluency and literacy of their teachers where ‘the teacher’s fluency is not apparent through classroom observation and assessment or interview assessment.’” [Lowell Sun]

Readers with long memories will recall the 1990s controversy over a hard-to-understand foreign-born teacher in Westfield, Mass. which led Massachusetts voters to adopt Question 2; I wrote about it for Reason here. By coincidence, presumably, Robishaw attended Westfield State College.

Tags: language bias, Massachusetts, teacher tenure

Teacher with poor English fluency appeals firing is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Unfit mother — for not speaking English?

Walter Olson — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:01:06 +0000

“One of DHS’s apparent fears is that an infant isn’t safe in a home where the mother can articulate a 911 call solely in a language spoken only by some 50,000 Oaxacan Indians.” The Pascagoula, Miss. child protection authorities deny that Cirila Baltazar Cruz’s inability to speak English or Spanish played a major role in the decision to take her baby away from her. [Time magazine via Stossel]

Tags: Child Protective Services, language bias

Unfit mother — for not speaking English? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

March 27 roundup

Walter Olson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:07:50 +0000

Find me someone who speaks Mixtecan, fast: under new California law health insurers must provide patients with certified language interpreters [Ventura County Star]
“Law Prof’s Article on His Jury Experience Leads to Overturned Verdict” [ABA Journal]
Quick, lock up the Internet: Harvard Law’s John Palfrey wants to unleash child-endangerment suits against online providers [Citizen Media Law]
“Another Lesbian Visitation Case has Liberty Counsel Spouting Nonsense” [Ed Brayton; earlier Miller-Jenkins case]
“Jury awards need to be fair, not lucrative” [Jackie Bueno Sousa, Miami Herald]
Aussie strip club disagrees with exotic dancer on whether faulty pole caused her injury [Brisbane Courier-Mail]
Hasbro nastygram over “Little Mr. Monopoly” use [Bob Ambrogi, Ron Coleman]
No, “crash of ’09″ doesn’t refute “capitalist system”, any more than “car wreck” refutes “auto-based travel”.

Tags: Australia, California, Crisis of 2008, Italy, juries, language bias, Miller-Jenkins case, nastygrams, strippers and exotic dancers

March 27 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

December 16 roundup

Walter Olson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:34:39 +0000

“The Boston Public Health Commission has just banned the sale of all tobacco products at colleges. Not high schools. Colleges.” [Saletan, Slate]
Sometimes the case caption seems to tell a little story all by itself [Lorraine Hodges v. Mt. Zion Temple d/b/a Zero Gravity Skatepark Oakland County, Mich., 12/1/2008 08-096435 NI Chabot (Pontiac), slip-fall on snow and ice]
Consumer complaint site Ripoff Report is magnet for lawsuits [Citizen Media Law, Eric Goldman and again]
EEOC hearing on English-in-the-workplace issues [Clegg, NRO "Corner"]
Wiretapper Anthony Pellicano, helpful gnome behind the scenes for many powerful Hollywood lawyers, sentenced to 15 years behind bars [CNN, Patterico]
“Hungary’s Constitutional Court says it has annulled a law giving rights to domestic partners because it would diminish the importance of marriage”; now just watch how many folks on both sides flip their opinion of judicial activism [AP/WHEC]
No teaser rates for you! Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren wants new law empowering federal government to order withdrawal of “too-risky” consumer credit products [Consumer Law & Policy]
Major new study of defensive medicine, conservatively estimated to waste $1.4 billion in Massachusetts alone [KevinMD, Boston Globe; Massachusetts Medical Society]

Tags: Anthony Pellicano, banks, Boston, defensive medicine, domestic partners, language bias, Massachusetts, tobacco

December 16 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

OK for private school to have English-only rule

Walter Olson — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:07:19 +0000

“A federal judge ruled [last month] that a Wichita Catholic school policy requiring students to speak only English didn’t break any civil rights laws.” U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten still felt free to give St. Anne Catholic School a tongue-lashing over the alleged divisiveness of its policy, though he found it did not rise to the level of creating a “hostile educational environment”, which would apparently have triggered liability even in a private religious school setting. (Ron Sylvester, “School prevails in English-only lawsuit”, Wichita Eagle, Aug. 16, GoogleCached).

Tags: Kansas, language bias, schools

OK for private school to have English-only rule is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system