The Civil Litigation Process
The focus of this paper will be to show how an employee would take a discrimination complaint against his or her employer. The process will be explored from where one would begin with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and proceeds through the civil litigation process from the state level up to the United States Supreme Court. In the examination of this scenario, it becomes necessary to define two key terms: discrimination and civil litigation.
Discrimination may be defined as the "prejudiced or prejudicial outlook, action, or treatment" of an individual or group towards another person or group (http://m-w.com/dictionary/discrimination, retrieved May 12, 2006). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was specifically written to provide relief from discrimination in a number of areas, but specific to this paper is the area of employment law, which is detailed in Title VII of the Act. The Act created the "legal basis for non-discrimination" in employment, "housing, education, public accommodations and federally assisted programs" (Bennett-Alexander, D.D. & Hartman, L. P., Employment Law for Business, 4 ed., pp 3-4).
Chris Honeyman states that "civil litigation is?the process that will be used if no other arrangement is agreed upon, for all sorts of asserted wrongs" (http://www.crinfo.org/CK_Essays/ck_civil_litigation.jsp, Copyright © 1999-2004, The Conflict Resolution Information Source, retrieved May 12, 2006). He further states that when one thinks of the term "lawsuit", this is the process that is being referred.
The Process
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, one must ask oneself a series of questions p ...