“This Monday, in the New Haven, Conn., firefighters case Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court held that it’s unlawful race discrimination for an employer to refuse to act on the results of a promotion exam because the test eliminated a disproportionate number of minority candidates (in the New Haven case, all the black firefighters up for promotion). I’ve written before that this argument threatens to burn down civil rights law. Now that the fuse has been lit, I’m writing to explain just how far the fire could spread.” [editor’s note: What’s “disproportionate?” Is there never any case in which a particular group of members of “race A” might perform better or worse than a particular group of members of “race B” at some particular task for some reason OTHER than the “races” involved? - TLK] (07/02/09)