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News and Events
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BCLR Releases Vol. LIV No. 2
Boston College Law Review is pleased to announce the publication of our March 2013 issue. • Jeremy Waldron, Separation of [...]
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BCLR Elects New Board of Editors
On March 22, 2013, the membership of the Boston College Law Review elected a new Board of Editors for the [...]
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BCLR Editors Win Student Writing Competitions
Two members of the Boston College Law Review‘s Executive Board, Laura Kaplan and Michael Palmisciano, recently won national writing competitions [...]
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Proof of Discrimination at Summary Judgment: The Eighth Circuit’s Focus on Categories of Evidence in Torgerson v. City of Rochester
Abstract: On June 1, 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in Torgerson v. City of Rochester, granted summary judgment for the employer, the City of Rochester, by holding that the plaintiffs had failed to produce sufficient direct or indirect evidence of discrimination. On appeal, the en banc Eighth Circuit categorized plaintiffs’ evidence and asked whether each piece, on its own, created a genuine issue of material fact. This Comment argues that the court’s preoccupation with categorizing evidence distracted it from determining whether discrimination occurred. Therefore, courts should adopt the dissent’s totality of the evidence approach, in which all of the evidence is considered in context when making a summary judgment determination.