Faces of LLS

Professor Garners National Attention for Work on Antidiscrimination and Constitutional Law Issues

Professor Kimberly West-Faulcon

Professor Kimberly West-Faulcon’s scholarship takes an interdisciplinary and empirical approach to examining antidiscrimination and constitutional law issues. Her article Exposing the Deceit About Disparate Impact in the Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal (2023) provides the first scholarly response to Professor Amy Wax’s article contending that American whites are cognitively superior to African Americans and Latinos. In doing so, the article defends Title VII disparate impact law’s presumption of racial group job ability equivalence as justified by industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology research findings. 

Several of West-Faulcon's recent and forthcoming publications focus on current challenges to affirmative action and other inclusion-motivated race attentiveness after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In Affirmative Action After SFFA v. Harvard: The Other Defenses in the Syracuse Law Review (2024), West-Faulcon identifies compelling interests other than diversity for inclusion-motivated consideration of race, and in The SFFA v. Harvard Trojan Horse Admissions Lawsuit in the Seattle University Law Review (2024), she analogizes attacks on inclusion-motivated civil rights laws and policies like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and race-based affirmative action to battle tactics employed by the Greek army in its war against the Trojans as told in Virgil’s The Aeneid. Her forthcoming article in the Northwestern University Law Review focuses on the fallaciousness of using the term “colorblind” to describe recent attacks on inclusion-motivated race attentiveness.

West-Faulcon’s insights in this area have garnered national media attention. In August 2024, she participated as an expert in the White House Racial Equity Roundtable convened by the Office of the White House Counsel.