Employer Centric Argument Analysis

This discussion leaves us with another trend that I need to explain: employer centrism seems associated with a justice’s view of reasonable accommodations. But why? I will suggest that a judge’s view of reasonable accommodations is a psychological effect of his employer- or employee-centric bias: the more employer-centric a judge is, the less likely he is to say that burdens put on employers are reasonable because of that bias. There is empirical backing for this hypothesis. A great deal of research has supported (though not without dissent) so-called “implicit bias”—thoughts and ideas, like stereotypical racial attitudes, that we do not recognize we have, but that we have nonetheless. Researchers at Cornell have found that implicit biases can manifest in judicial decisionmaking, with one study concluding, in clear terms, that “implicit biases can affect judges’ judgment[s]” (Rachlinski, 2009). In that study, black judges showing black-favoring implicit bias were more
The researchers in this very study identify ways to “induce” deliberation, two of which clearly apply here: time and opinion writing. About 140 days (~4.7 months) passed between oral argument in U.S. Airways and the delivery of written opinions. Both of these factors weaken the psychological likelihood of intuitive decisionmaking playing a part in the U.S. Airways decision. Not to mention, whether bias played an actual role in a judge’s decision is necessarily, at least with current technology, uncertain. Thus, all I can assert is (1) that these opinions expressed varying degrees of employer centrism, (2) that the degree of employer centrism manifest in a particular opinion correlated with that opinion’s overall take on reasonable accommodations, and (3) that there are at least two psychological phenomena that can explain why (1) may have caused (2). But crucially, I cannot prove conclusively that this is the case in U.S. Airways or in any