The EU has progressively introduced antidiscrimination enforcement measures like the duty to set up Equality Bodies (EBs) that applies to the ground of racial or ethnic origin, among others. Until recently, however, EU law only envisaged vague standards for EBs that allowed a wide range of national configurations. Building on international benchmarks, this paper draws a set of dimensions considered necessary to improve promotion-type EBs responsiveness to discrimination. These dimensions are applied to the British and Spanish EBs to illustrate how the gaps left by EU law may lead to the design of ineffective bodies. The paper argues that EBs can contribute to effectively tackling discrimination if they are designed to be responsive at individual and systemic levels. The 2018 EU Recommendation on Standards for EBs makes a step forward in that direction, but its practical relevance may be limited by its non-binding nature.

Australia adopted the Charities Act of 2013, consolidating and restating the country's governing statutes on the registration and qualification of charities, but leaving to the future any reconciliation between faith-related charities claiming religious liberty and others demanding marriage equality and no discrimination based on sexuality. Concurrent to this development, but with an eye to the direction of charity law in common law systems throughout the world, major works have come to us from two Australian scholars. In this review I offer much about these two monographs, but the discussion that immediately follows concerns the law of charitable nonprofits in the United States, the basic structure of that law, and current issues implicating religious freedom.

This article tackles the integration of intersectionality into Canadian antidiscrimination law practices by arguing that treating the grounds of discrimination discretely contributes to the further marginalization of multi-discriminated individuals and groups. After tracing the origins and evolution of the intersectional approach to discrimination, it examines the critique addressed by the proponents of intersectionality to mainstream antidiscrimination law. Drawing on a jurisprudential analysis of 30 complaint cases claiming intersectional discrimination treated in Canadian and Quebec courts in the last 20 years, the authors set up a typology of the modes of conception of discrimination by the courts: monistic, compartmentalized, additive, and holistic (intersectional). Institutionalizing intersectionality within antidiscrimination law may be a promising avenue to reconfigure equality-safeguarding judicial apparatuses so as to better enable the struggle against multiple and interlocking forms of oppression and discrimination. Yet it can also become a liberal practice of “diversity management” that obscures structural inequalities and hallows a discourse based on individual vulnerabilities.

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, an article that drew explicitly on Black feminist criticism, and challenged three prevailing frameworks: 1) the male-centered nature of antiracist politics, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual Black men; 2) the White-centered nature of feminist theorizing, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women; and 3) the “single-axis”/sex or race-centered nature of antidiscrimination regimes, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women and Black men. Crenshaw demonstrated how people within the same social group (e.g., African Americans) are differentially vulnerable to discrimination as a result of other intersecting axes of disadvantage, such as gender, class, or sexual orientation.

This essay builds on that insight by articulating a performative conceptualization of race. It assumes that a judge is sympathetic to intersectionality and thus recognizes that Black women are often disadvantaged based on the intersection of their race and sex, among other social factors. This essay asks: How is that judge likely to respond to a case in which a firm promotes four Black women but not the fifth? The judge could conclude that there is no discrimination because the firm promoted four people (Black women) with the same intersectional identity as the fifth (a Black woman). We argue that this evidentiary backdrop should not preclude a finding of discrimination. It is plausible that our hypothetical firm utilized racially associated ways of being—performative criteria (self presentation, accent, demeanor, conformity, dress, and hair style)—to differentiate among and between the Black women. The firm might have drawn an intra-group, or intra-intersectional, line between the fifth Black women and the other four based on the view that the fifth Black woman is “too Black.” We describe the ease with which institutions can draw such lines and explain why doing so might constitute impermissible discrimination. Our aim is to broaden the conceptual terms upon which we frame both social categories and discrimination.

The decision in Noar Kahalacha, an anti-segregation in education case that was recently delivered by the Israeli High Court of Justice, has been ‘naturally’ celebrated as the ‘Israeli Brown’. But is it? This article points to the differences between the monumental US Supreme Court decision of Brown and the Israeli Brown-equivalent – Noar Kahalacha. It contends that the two cases bear differences that stem from the divergent patterns of discrimination they represent, and that they reflect these differences squarely. The discrimination patterns reflected by the cases differ by virtue of traits that are traditionally overlooked in antidiscrimination theoretical analysis. Comparing the two cases, therefore, allows us an opportunity to revisit the notion of discrimination and its antidote, antidiscrimination. Drawing on the dichotomous concepts of de jure/de facto discrimination and difference/sameness discrimination, the article shows how these dual theoretical notions are determinative in shaping the distinctiveness of each of these cases. While the African American victims in Brown were easily recognised as a distinctive group suffering from de jure discrimination, the Mizrahi victims in Noar Kahalacha – who suffer from de facto discrimination within a Jewish hegemonic society – lacked such clear recognition. Accordingly, the discrimination narrative that Noar Kahalacha provides is very incomplete and carries only limited potential for effective application in future struggles to eliminate discriminatory practices against Mizrahis in Israel. Brown, on the other hand, carries a converse trait. Though criticised, Brown, nevertheless, strongly signifies the recognition by White America of its overarching discriminatory practices, and implies a genuine dedication to break from it. This understanding further illuminates the limitations embedded in the possibility of ‘importing’ highly contextual antidiscrimination jurisprudence from abroad into our system's highly contextual reality of discrimination.