Is it discriminatory to operate a real-estate website catering for a specific non-English language in the US? My understanding of US discrimination laws is that the wording of the real-estate listing must not discriminate by race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin. If a website complies with all of the above, but only supports one language, e.g. Spanish, Italian, Russian, etc. Is that considered discrimination? If the website was to have an English version of its listings, but also the exact same listing translated into one language, i.e. English &amp; Spanish only, is that discriminating against speakers of other languages? This is assuming that all listings on the website comply with the discrimination laws and don't unfairly discriminate in any way. It's just that they would be written in one non-English language, or English + one non-English language.
No this is not a violation of discrimination law as there is no official language (de jure) in the United States at the Federal Level even though English, as the most common language is considered the National Language (de facto). Language is not a Federally recognized basis of discrimination for private business (your local state may require it though). Compared to Canada, where all services must be in English or French to comply with their Official Languages being English and French. It could be argued that, given America's very liberal Freedom of Speech laws, that requiring catering to a specific language by law could be challenged as a violation of your First Amendment Rights (after all, if you have freedom of speech, then you should have freedom of speech that others do not understand). Since there is nothing stopping an English Speaking American from learning the language you wish to do business in, nor is it confined to any race or religion (I, as a predominotly European descent, am perfectly capable of learning Arabic... or Japanese... or Navajo...). Where the confusion comes from is that in the United States, courts will often provide a linguistic interpreter for those who are not native English Speakers (even if they are conversational, given how technical legal terms can be, it may people who speak English as a Second Language will avail themselves of this service for the sake of making sure the nuance is properly translated).
Employment discrimination based on the initial or native language of a prospective employee is probably not lawful under US federal law. Requiring the English-language skills actually needed for a particular job is lawful. Doing &quot;editing, writing, or translation&quot; obviously requires language fluency. But unless a business can demonstrate that it is impossible for non-native speakers to achieve fluency comparable to native speakers needed for a particular position, demanding a specific native language would be demanding a particular national origin, and thus be an unlawful practice. According to 42 U.S. Code § 2000e–2 It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer— (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; (emphasis added) The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has a page on &quot;Immigrants' Employment Rights under Federal Anti-Discrimination Laws&quot; which says: The law protects people against employment discrimination on the basis of their national origin. Following are some examples of employment discrimination based on national origin. ... Unlawful national origin discrimination may include discrimination because of a person's looks, customs, or language. ... Treating employees differently because they have a foreign accent is lawful only if accent materially interferes with being able to do the job. .... According to Nolo's page on &quot;Language and Accent Discrimination in the Workplace&quot;: A job requirement that an employee must be fluent in English is legal if fluency is required to effectively perform the position. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that interprets and enforces the laws prohibiting discrimination, has pointed out that the degree of fluency required varies from job to job, even within the same company. Therefore, blanket fluency requirements that apply equally to the customer service department and the warehouse workers might not be legal. According to Workplace Fairness's page on &quot;Language Discrimination&quot;: Language discrimination is a subset of national origin discrimination. Language discrimination refers to the unfair treatment of an individual based solely upon the characteristics of their speech; such as, accent, size of vocabulary, and syntax. It can also involve a person's ability or inability to use one language instead of another. Because language discrimination is a form of national origin discrimination, the same body of law prohibits it. ... Language discrimination is the unfair treatment of an individual solely because of their native language or other characteristics of speech, such as accent, size of vocabulary, and syntax. ... Some courts and government agencies have said that discrimination based on language is a form of national origin discrimination because primary language is closely related to the place a person comes from ... In &quot;What Recent Court Cases Indicate About English-Only Rules In The Workplace&quot; by Rosanna McCalipst (U. PA. JOURNAL OF LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT LAW, volume 4 issue 2) it is said that: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that it is unlawful to discriminate in the terms or conditions of employment based on one's race, religion, sex or national origin. There are two ways a plaintiff can prevail. Either the plaintiff can prove disparate treatment, meaning the employer intentionally discriminated on the basis of one of the protected grounds, or disparate impact, meaning a seemingly neutral employment practice puts an undue burden on members of a protected class. ... The disparate impact analysis was first set out by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. 401 U.S. 424 (1971). From that case and the decisions of various courts interpreting the holding, a burden shifting analysis has emerged. There are three steps to the analysis. First, the plaintiff must establish that the policy in question has a disparate impact on a protected class. Next the employer must defend the policy by proffering a legitimate business purpose for it. Last, the plaintiff can still prevail if it shows there is a less discriminatory method by which the legitimate business goal can be obtained. According to &quot;Avoiding Claims of Citizenship and National Origin Discrimination When Interviewing, Hiring, and Onboarding Foreign Workers&quot; by the Dickinson Wright law firm: National origin discrimination includes, but is not limited to, discrimination due to place of birth, country of origin, ancestry, native language, and may be based on a perception that the individual looks or sounds “foreign,” or any other national origin indicator. I should add that if an employer is using &quot;native&quot; simply to mean &quot;a very high level of fluency and skill with the language&quot; then such a requirement is not discriminatory under 42 U.S. Code § 2000e–2, and quite likely not under any US law. If the employer is using &quot;native&quot; to mean &quot;a very high level of fluency and skill obtained by learning the language as a young child&quot; then the case is less clear, and most of the precedents cited above will be of only limited significance at best. I could not find a case squarely on point where a requirement for a &quot;native speaker&quot; in either of these senses, or indeed in any sense, was challenged.
It is not clear from your question whether you intend to make use of the Yelp API to display Yelp ratings on your own website. You ask: So is my idea fair use of these websites data or is not because of the TOS? The ToS is not for Yelp data, it is for the Yelp API. The ToS will only apply to you if you agree to it. However, if you agree to the ToS for the API, fair use is irrelevant. The ToS is a legally binding contract that trumps fair use. You also brings up Google's display of Yelp stars. This display is not based on the Google using the Yelp API, but on Yelp opting in on a mechansim created by Google called Rich Snippets. Returning to Yelp ToS, it is clear that its purpose is permit re-use of their "ratings, reviews, photos" etc. by to promote your own Yelp-rated business. Also what they clearly do not allow you do do, is to build a competitor to Yelp. Since your planned restaurant rating site would compete with Yelp, you will not be able to use the Yelp API to get the data. What if you didn't use the Yelp API, but simply scraped their site - would fair use apply? What constitutes fair use in borderline cases such as yours is mainly decided by case law. Case law differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. My general impression is that it is not fair use if the use is commercial in nature (i.e. you create something intended to directly compete with the site you scrape the data from) and your product or service does not communicate something new and different from the original or expands its utility. As always: If you want specific advice, hire a lawyer.
In fact, the immigration quotas do not discriminate. The described limit is that "No more than 7 percent of the visas may be issued to natives of any one independent country in a fiscal year; no more than 2 percent may issued to any one dependency of any independent country". All countries get the same upper limit. Additionally, anti-discrimination laws are subject matter specific: they exist because Congress passed a law that prohibits using race as a basis for employing a person (which Congress can do because of the Commerce Clause). Congress has not passed any such law pertaining to granting of visas. There is a path of reasoning that could lead to concluding that national quotas violate anti-discrimination laws, based on an "effects test" (disparate impact). It appears to be a fact that an applicant for a visa has a much higher probability of being denied a visa is their country of origin is China or India, as opposed to Sweden, which one could spin into a disparate impact argument. In order for this argument to become the law, there would have to be a case brought to the federal courts to the effect that national quotas are illegal, and as far as I know there has never been such a case. There are no provisions in anti-discrimination legislation that support a disparate impact doctrine in immigration, and pretty clear evidence that it was not congressionally intended since Title 8 Ch. 12 clearly calls for nation-based quotas. A final point: "national origin discrimination" is based on "an individual's, or his or her ancestor's, place of origin; or because an individual has the physical, cultural or linguistic characteristics of a national origin group". A Swedish citizen of "Chinese national origin" is subject to the Swedish quota, not the Chinese quota, thus the discrimination is based on country of citizenship, not national origin.
It would indeed be valid and legally enforceable. The Constitution places no limits on what languages bills must be written in. The Constitution specifically allows each house of Congress to make its own rules for how it passes bills, so, even if a house of Congress had a rule requiring its bills to be in English (which they don't, as far as I know,) they could simply change the rules and then pass the bill. From a practical standpoint, though, enforceability would also require courts to be able to discern Congress' intent from the bill. As such, unless we're expanding the assumption to &quot;the vast majority of the U.S., including the courts in all parts of the country, are now fluent in Spanish,&quot; then it's exceedingly unlikely that Congress actually would pass a substantive bill in a language other than English. Even without assuming all of Congress were fluent, it's possible that they could pass a resolution in Spanish as a gesture, but they would almost certainly not pass a substantive bill in Spanish (or any other language than English) due to the enforceability problems it would cause with courts (and, if relevant, regulatory agencies, etc.) Aside from the courts needing to be able to understand the normal meanings of the words in Spanish, there would also be the problem of the complete lack of any legal history of Spanish words in U.S. law (or even in common law in general.) Much of legal interpretation is steeped in history of what particular words have meant (and/or been ruled by courts to mean) in past laws. Throwing all of that legal history out the window by switching to another language would be quite problematic when trying to craft a bill on any substantive subject matter. Suffice it to say that crafting the definitions section for such a bill would be quite a task. So, yes, it would technically be legal and it would indeed be the law, but doing it with any substantive subject matter (without assuming that most of the population now understands Spanish) would be so problematic for enforceability in practice that they wouldn't actually consider doing it.
Contracts are illegal if they require a signatory to break the law, so the contract here is detailing that this specific clause does not apply if following it would contradict the law. It's basically saying that no signatory may hold the other for breaking contract terms if the reason for breaking the contract terms is because the law specifically says these things are required. For example, if the contract reads "The hotel does not allow guests to have animals in the room", this creates an illegal situation if said animal is a guide dog assisting a blind person, which must be allowed under laws for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). By changing this clause to "The hotel does not allow guests to have animals in the room, except as required by federal, state or local law." Then it is now acceptable. A able bodied guest will still be in breach of contract if a cat is brought into the room, but a blind person would not be in breach because the law says you cannot use this to bar a blind person with a guide dog, and the contract must comply with the law. The Cat Person can be thrown out for breech of contract, but the blind person cannot because this exception allows the blind person to bring the dog into the rented room.
No - there is no general requirement to be fair to all applicants when selecting someone for a job. It's not even clear how this would work - you would need to define what "fair" means in this context, and there would be many competing definitions. Is it fair to prefer an applicant who has more experience because they received help from their parents with landing their first job? Is it fair to prefer someone with a certain look for an acting job? Is it fair to prefer someone who happens to have a similar personality to the person hiring? So if the employer finds it more convenient to use the same test every year, and if they do not mind that this gives some applicants an advantage, they are free to do that. The only exception is that discrimination based on certain, specific factors (often called "protected characteristics") is usually outlawed. The list depends on jurisdictions, but usually includes things like gender, race and age. However, even in that case discrimination is allowed if the business can demonstrate a genuine need - for example, when looking for an actor, it is allowed to hire based on gender.
That a company (C) has a website that can be accessed from a given county does not mean that the company operates in that country. If C is located in country A, markets and advertises to country A, offers products designed to appeal in country A, has its site only in the primary language of country A, uses servers located in country A, and has all its assets and physical offices in country A, it is not operating in country X, even if a few people from X do business with C over its web site. Country X may have laws which claim to apply to C or its web site. It will find it hard to enforce those laws, particularly if owners and officers of X do not travel to X. It will find it hard to extradite anyone for violations of the laws of X unless those actions are also crimes under the laws of A. If X is a major, powerful country such as the US, the UK, or the EU it may be able to get A to enforce its court orders, or to use its influence over the banking system to impose penalties on C. If X is North Korea, or even Brazil, it is probably out of luck. Thus the management of C needs worry primarily about the laws of A, and to a lesser extent the laws of major countries that make some effort to enforce their laws outside their own borders, such as the GDPR, or certain US laws. It probably has little reason to worry about the laws of other countries. If A is itself a major country that can easily resist any pressue from X, C has even less reason to worry. If C does significant business in countries D and E, and particularly if it opens physical offices in D or keeps assets in E, it will have much more reason to worry about the laws of D and E. If it does advertising in the D &amp; E markets, this also gives C more reason to be concerned with their laws. There is always some risk of X finding a way to enforce its laws, but the risk is small.