ABSTRACT
We are very pleased that we have been asked to contribute a chapter on legal principles for this volume. For almost 40 years, principles of employee selection-practice and legal-have been illuminated through employment litigation opinions. Granted, judges write opinions, but these judges depend heavily on industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists in framing these opinions and are generous in their citations to our work and our testimony. So we see clear role for employment litigation knowledge bases in this volume. In the context of this role, we have been asked to identify some selection practices that are commonly at issue in employment discrimination cases. Further, we have been asked to formulate some “principles” that the practitioner might keep in mind when attempting to minimize legal risk when using such practices. Finally, we have been asked to identify exemplar court cases related to each principle we have formulated. Here it is important to make a distinction between our current use of the term “principle” as simply a basic and generally accepted combination of science and practice and “the” Principles promulgated by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP; 2003), which are currently in their fourth edition. The SIOP Principles are not intended to illuminate exclusively legal issues, whereas our principles are. The SIOP Principles do not ignore legal foundation but have much broader applications in mind and are considerably greater in scope than the current “legal” principles. Neither are we intending to address the “best” practice from a theoretical or empirical perspective. Instead, we are simply articulating what might be seen as a “defensible” practice from the legal perspective. Nevertheless, the principles we present are general rather than specifi c and are well documented through years of litigation.
