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It seems to me there are two axes here: vague versus concrete legislation, and restrictive versus unrestrictive. Complaining that the current system is too restrictive (or not restrictive enough) for private companies (or public organizations) seems like a fairly interesting debate. But I really really don't think you want to be asking for concrete legislation that irons out all the ambiguity, like "only these 5 industries can ask math questions during interviews", "you can only require applicants to write essays if their job involves writing more than 4 essays a year", etc.
Passing the buck on to judges is how systems try to avoid insanely idiotic edge cases that inevitably comes from extremely concrete legislation -- judges are the political organ trusted with discretion and judgement.
Yes, that makes the legal system less predictable (which is bad), but the alternative is not "incredibly concrete legislation that doesn't have any terrible edge cases". The alternative is "iron-rules bureaucracy that follows a brain-dead flow chart" -- i.e. precisely the system that people on here like to complain about.
Granted, "prove x is true" can be incredibly sane or downright impossible, depending on how sensible your judge is. I just don't think there is really an alternative here that isn't worse. Similarly, note that the rules on this website are also pretty open to interpretation, and you may get different rulings from different mods. Nonetheless, trying to simply write more concrete rules could never actually work.
The counterfactual isn’t dumb regulations about tests, it’s racial quotas or laissez faire freedom of association. The politics of quotas have been unpalatable to voters forever so instead we get opaque jurisprudence trying to square the circle of stopping racism without noticing minority underperformance. There’s a ton of path dependence that got us here, and while the bureaucracy might be metastatic at this point good concrete legislation in the 1960s might have built a different, more functional world.
Are you arguing you'd prefer the New York school system to use racial quotas? Or that you'd prefer if principals could exclusively hire $race $gender teachers and be protected by freedom of association?
The current system of "hey, try to let the requirements of the job drive the hiring process. Sorry that we can't give you a perfect checklist that guarantees you won't be sued" seems far superior to either of those.
I’d prefer if good workers were hired over bad workers, and failing that quotas could grant the system of racial spoils some transparency. The status quo of neither drives inflationary compliance costs where every company has to shell out for the next hot seminar about racial equity or run the risk of deviating from standard practice and thus become liable for a lawsuit.
But that wasn’t my point. What we get is overdetermined; underperforming minorities are going to underperform, and it’s mean to be mean about that, but they on average are worse than the average worker, so we get a stupid compromise that solves nothing with immense costs but sounds nice and fair so we’re going to be stuck with it forever.
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