Sunstein and Jolls on the Law of Implicit Bias

Cass Sunstein (Chicago) and Christine Jolls (Yale) have posted on SSRN their forthcoming piece in the California Law Review: The Law of Implicit Bias.

From the abstract:

Considerable attention has been given to the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which finds that most people have an implicit and unconscious bias against members of traditionally disadvantaged groups. Implicit bias poses a special challenge for antidiscrimination law because it suggests the possibility that people are treating others differently even when they are unaware that they are doing so. Some aspects of current law operate, whether intentionally or not, as controls on implicit bias; it is possible to imagine other efforts in that vein. An underlying suggestion is that implicit bias might be controlled through a general strategy of "debiasing through law."

Implicit bias and the IAT have been all the rage in employment discrimination scholarship recently (see our past post on the topic here).

You can download this important new article on this issue here.

PS