Dress For Success

As some readers may know the New York City Human Rights Commission (HRC) suit against seven Williamsburg shopkeepers was settled a few weeks ago just as the trial was about to begin. Under the settlement the HRC dropped its demand for a $75000 fine — a figure it later claimed its attorneys mistakenly substituted for $7 500 — against each of the store owners for posting signs requesting modest dress in their stores. The court told lawyers for the two sides to negotiate acceptable language for future signs that will make clear that everybody is welcome “which ” said defense attorney Jay Lefkowitz “was the reality” all along anyway.

At an earlier stage of the case the judge had told the HRC that it could only win if it could prove the signs used “code words” to keep nonreligious Jews and non-Jews from shopping in the stores. So it commissioned a survey designed to demonstrate that the non-Orthodox public would find the signs discriminatory. The shopkeepers’ defense team set about creating its own alternative survey.

But the HRC’s own survey found that a plurality of respondents didn’t think the sign would make anyone feel discriminated against on the basis of religion although a higher number said they saw the signs as discriminating based on gender. For its part the defense’s survey produced very different results with 87 percent of respondents believing the signs weren’t problematic at all.

“The trial” wrote Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard “was shaping up to be a matter of dueling witnesses and dueling surveys.” But while “the defense team representing the Jewish business owners… was to present the head of the research firm that conducted its survey to testify to its scientific validity… the Human Rights Commission offered no expert to testify on behalf of its survey. With no attempt to demonstrate the scientific validity of its survey the commission would likely be laughed out of a real court of law…. The next day the administrative judge informed the Human Rights Commission that its case was remarkably weak and that it might want to settle.”