Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody

Albemarle (defendant) required employees seeking transfer into higher-skilled job lines to pass general ability tests, even though incumbents already in those lines never had to pass them; the tests disproportionately excluded Black employees (plaintiffs), who sued under Title VII. Albemarle's post-hoc validation study compared test scores to subjective supervisor rankings across a small, mostly non-Black sample without accounting for differing skills across job lines, and the district court denied back pay partly because Albemarle lacked bad faith and the plaintiffs had been inconsistent in requesting that remedy.