Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws - Hardcover

Epstein, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674308085 ISBN 13: 9780674308084

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1992

Synopsis

This timely and controversial book presents powerful theoretical and empirical arguments for the repeal of the anti-discrimination laws within the workplace. Richard Epstein demonstrates that these laws set one group against another, impose limits on freedom of choice, unleash bureaucratic excesses, mandate inefficient employment practices, and cause far more invidious discrimination than they prevent. Epstein urges a return to the now-rejected common law principles of individual autonomy that permit all persons to improve their position through trade, contract, and bargain, free of government constraint.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and an Adjunct Scholar of the Cato Institute.

Review:

Epstein has convinced me...that the abuses of the anti-discrimination laws are so intimately connected with misconceptions in the laws themselves that any benefits from them will always be far outweighed by the harm they do.
--Harry V. Jaffa (Wall Street Journal)

Forbidden Grounds covers not only laws on racial discrimination but also sex discrimination, age discrimination and disability discrimination. Never has the whole range of anti-discrimination laws been subjected to such a thorough and penetrating critique. No one who writes on this subject again can be taken seriously if he [or she] does not confront the analysis presented here by Epstein.
--Thomas Sowell (Forbes)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0674308085
• ISBN 13: 9780674308084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 530