Law Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for legal professionals, students, and others with experience or interest in law. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The premise of the television programme Suits relies on a New York law firm so élitist that it only hires Harvard Law School graduates, and rejects all other applications.
In real life, would this be legal under New York and federal law, or would it be indirect racial discrimination, given that Harvard Law School graduates are less Black and Hispanic (and more White) than the United States at large?
The New York Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the basis of “age, race, creed, color, national origin, sexual orientation, military status, sex, marital status or disability”.
Federal law prevents employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information (including family medical history).
What law school you went to is on neither list.
If Harvard’s policies break the rules, that’s not the firm’s issue. However, AFAIK, Harvard is scrupulously fair in their admissions program - so long as you have the grades and the money, they’ll let you in. It’s not Harvard’s fault that most of the people who get the best secondary education and have the most money are predominantly white, Christian, and US born - that’s do to politico-social-historical-economic factors beyond Harvard’s control.
This is legal.
Discrimination, under US federal and state law, is only illegal if it is on the basis of one or more specific, enumerated protected characteristics (such as race, sex, religion, national origin, etc).
Additionally, Havard's demographics vs the general population's is not the correct test to use, because they are not hiring from the general population. They are hiring lawyers (or law school graduates, it's been a while since I watched the show, but I don't recall the firm requiring its hires to pass the New York bar exam before being hired), so one should instead compare Harvard's graduation demographics to the national breakdown of law school graduates.
Note that while there is a movement to recognize "indirect discrimination" (where non discriminatory policies have unequal effects on protected groups), there are "safe havens" for discrimination for necessity, such as in following other laws or regulations. Most any law firm will have a not-demographically representative selection of lawyers, because lawyers must have been admitted into the local(State) bar(meaning an organization of lawyers, by passing a test), and that pool is usually also "less Black and Hispanic" than the general population.
