Abstract
United Kingdom sex and race discrimination legislation has been in place for 25 years. There is general agreement both that the legislation has had some degree of beneficial impact but that change is long overdue. There is a need to take greater and more sophisticated account of the limits of law as a medium for the promotion of social change. At the same time, international and other developments continue to press for the extension of legislation to different grounds of discrimination.
The University of Cambridge Centre for Public Law and the Judge Institute of Management Studies recently published a report entitled ‘Equality: a New Framework.’ At approximately the same time the Runnymede Trust (which is concerned solely with racial justice) published a report entitled ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain.’ This review article examines both reports, concentrating on the issues relevant to the legal control of employment discrimination. It congratulates the authors of both reports for their detailed and sophisticated understanding of the issues, and their proposals for law reform, but remains somewhat sceptical of the capacity of even a reformed law to transform the behaviour and attitude of employers, especially small and medium-sized employers.
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