This is too good to pass up. Article III Groupie posts a few blind items about federal judges and uncovers a few more.
UTR also pointed out this passage from lawyer turned author Mark Costello, Throwing Away the Key (NYT Mag $), who had this to say about one federal judge presumably from NJ (UTR says its Judge Harold A. Ackerman):"I knew only one judge who took pleasure in sentencing. This judge was smart and very hard-working. He said he believed that male prosecutors should wear only white shirts. If you came in with a blue or, God forbid, a patterned shirt, you would be admonished from the bench. He didn't care what defense attorneys or female prosecutors wore in terms of shirts, which some women found a relief and others considered insulting. The fact that the judge had us all thinking about the meaning of shirts, and the rules about shirts, gives you some idea of the unique psychic force field that was the man's courtroom."
This Judge's dress code seems eerily similar to me to how employer's expect men and women to dress in the work place.
Professor Joanna Grossman in The End of "Ladies' Night" in New Jersey had this to say about federal judges showing themselves blind to their own biases:"Consider dress codes. Title VII prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of sex. Other than for a very small subset of hiring decisions, the statute contains no defenses to a claim of facial discrimination - that is, discrimination that is pursuant to a policy that expressly differentiates persons based on sex. And it contains no exception for dress codes. Yet courts, in case after case, have upheld the right of employers to maintain sex-specific dress and grooming codes ... courts simply mouth platitudes about the employer's prerogative to run their business as they see fit, or about society's generally accepted principles of grooming, while giving license to these discriminatory policies. The reason this matters is that sex-specific dress codes reflect societal stereotypes and prejudices about what men and women should look like. These stereotypes punish both men and women who do not happen to fit traditional expectations of masculinity and femininity. Meanwhile, dress codes also reinforce a gender hierarchy, in which a working woman is evaluated on both appearance and job performance. The requirement that women must wear (typically) leg-revealing business dresses or skirts, for instance, is not innocuous. [] For dress codes, then, the de minimis exception courts have carved out has served to perpetuate existing gender hierarchies. Based on this comparison, courts should be wary of carving out similar exceptions in the future."
In reading the two paragraphs in conjunction, it seems to me that federal judges who themselves have hardened notions of how men in particular should dress will not allow that to be watered down by discriminatory practices in the workplace. The fact that men must wear white shirts and ties is the standard, because to require that employers maintain a gender neutral dress code will only lead to more more casually dressed men. You wouldn't expect them to demand that women wear suits and ties as well, would you?
To squelch the furor over the Ladies' night ruling that discontinued special deals for women at bars statewide, NJ Gov. James McGreevey has denounced the decision as "bureaucratic nonsense" and the state Assembly voted 78-0 to approve a bill legalizing the practice. Thanks to Lydia Markoff for the pointer.
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