Discrimination at Work

Discrimination at Work

Discrimination at Work

It is my pleasure to introduce Professor Marie Mercat-Bruns’s work to an American
audience in this translation. While the topic of antidiscrimination protections in
employment law is of course of very great intrinsic interest, it has a much greater
symbolic reach, and I hope that with this translation, Mercat-Bruns’s brilliantly
conceived project will find a global audience. For the idea of antidiscrimination
is, as Yale Dean Robert Post says in this book, another face of the ideal of the
citizen-worker and the attributes of that citizen-worker that are above or below
the notice of the state. The conception of the citizen-worker is under tremendous
pressure, both in Europe and the United States, arising from a new sentiment
among citizens in all advanced democracies that salient aspects of one’s identity
and humanity need not be covered or closeted in public, nor are they appropriate
bases for rejection or refusal. The law and philosophy of antidiscrimination is, in
other words, the law and philosophy of the democratic citizen

Marie Mercat-Bruns