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S
uppose your company hires a black man only to fire him less than a year later. If the man claims that his race motivated the termination decisions, would arguing that the same person made both employment decisions create a viable defense?
I
t’s called the “same-actor inference.” As a New York federal judge recently described it, “where the person who made the decision to fire was the same person who made the decision to hire, it is difficult to impute to [that decisionmaker] an invidious motivation that would be inconsistent with the decis
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on to hire.” In the fact pattern I’ve described