Iowa judge rejects implicit bias lawsuit

Back in February, I posted about a class-action discrimination lawsuit in Iowa against the state government based on the novel theory of "implicit bias." The claim asserted that the class members could recover for unconscious discrimination in the government's hiring practice and attempted to prove that claim through statistics alone. A state court judge has now rejected that theory and dismissed the case. The judge ruled that the Plaintiffs did not prove that "subjective, discretionary decision-making" caused any discriminatory hiring or promotional decisions. The judge also wrote that there was no legal precedent for the Plaintiffs' implicit bias theory.