ABSTRACT
Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust (1988) was a single-plaintiff case that extended the legal theory of disparate impact to subjective employment decisions. While holding that subjective judgments are not presumptively unlawful, the Supreme
Court in Watson concluded that subjectivity in decision making could still implicate issues of stereotypes with adverse effect on minorities and other protected classes. Accordingly, the court held that subjective elements of a decision-making process can be challenged under disparate impact analysis. Justice O’Connor, writing for the court in a four-justice opinion, found this result necessary but “uninviting,” because it “has the potential to create a Hobson’s choice for employers and thus to lead in practice to perverse results” (Watson, 1988, p. 993). Cutting right to the heart of the problem for employers, she stated,
It is completely unrealistic to assume that unlawful discrimination is the sole cause of people failing to gravitate to jobs and employers in accordance with the law of chance . . . [or] to suppose that employers can eliminate, or discover and explain, the myriad of innocent causes that may lead to statistical imbalances in the composition of their work forces.
