The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is the federal agency entrusted with administering most federal civil rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, among others.

The Commission serves multiple important functions including processing individual charges of discrimination, determining the few deemed worthy of a finding of probable cause, and the fewer of those that merit EEOC intervention into the district court as plaintiff in favor of the complainant. The Commission also acts as the Administrative Tribunal for federal-sector employees who grieve violations of these laws in workplace. The EEOC performs multiple other functions, but the one that is the focus of this presentation is its role in shaping interpretation of discrimination law in the Circuit Courts as amicus. In this course, attorneys Gregory Antollino and Stephen Bergstein address recent instances of EEOC intervention in the Circuit Courts and the hot-button issues in employment law that have garnered the attention of the Commission.  

Learning Objectives: 

1. Discuss an overview of the EEOC, its functions, and the most typical interaction between it, a charging party, and the employers charged with discrimination
2. Identify cutting edge issues in employment discrimination law that have attracted EEOC attention
3. Address recent examples of EEOC intervention as amicus in the Circuit Courts, with an emphasis on its 2015 conclusion that discrimination on the basis of sexual-orientation falls within the ambit of Sex Discrimination under the Civil Rights Act and the reasons therefore