Employment discrimination claims are often decided on the merits of the claim. Courts routinely have to answer the question: Did the employer discriminate on the basis of a protected class against an employee in terminating the employment of that individual?

But there’s another class of cases that can resolved on procedural grounds, often times in

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. 

It’s the time when I delve into the annual report of case statistics released by the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.  It’s a time to look for trends. And yes, I get excited about this report every year.

The most obvious trend? Case filings are down.

Yesterday, my colleague Peter Murphy and I set out to write a summary of one of Connecticut’s quiet success stories during this pandemic — the Shared Work program from the Connecticut Department of Labor.

You can find the entire article here.

What is this little program that has served an outsized role the last few

As I was saying about some days… Wednesday merits TWO posts.

Earlier this week, I made my long-awaited (ok, long-awaited by ME) return on WNPR’s ever-popular “Where We Live” show.

As always, I’m thankful for the invite.

My appearances date back quite some time (remember pizza and child labor in 2010?), so it was nice to be back in the studio to talk about age discrimination

Back in the 1990s, employers still had the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings and the tawdry sexual harassment allegations relatively fresh on their minds. Employment lawyers will tell you that they started to see a bump up in claims in the early to mid 1990s as the issues of workplace harassment raised to the surface.

I

numbersThis week, the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, a self-described “free market” think tank, issued an article suggesting that Connecticut had nearly the same number of discrimination complaints as our neighboring state, Massachusetts.

(This isn’t the first time it’s been critical of the CHRO.)

In doing so, the Yankee Institute claimed that these statistics

zombieAs I did last year, after I posted on the general statistics of the CHRO to see if we could glean any trends, I took a deeper dive into what the statistics this year show.  And there were definitely a few surprises.

Obviously, at the risk of repeating yesterday’s post, FY 2015-2016 was