Since the passage of the major civil rights legislation of the sixties, the courts have been entertaining ever more sophisticated statistical arguments in discrimination cases. A review of this development clarifies the numerous conceptual and technical difficulties inherent in the regression approach to analysis of covariance. A nonparametric analysis based on matching is supported as more responsive to the fundamental question involved: whether individuals who are similar with respect to all pertinent variables are treated differently depending on their membership in a particular class.
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