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This chapter is about a basic conceptual, legal, and moral concept that was used successfully by Sears, Roebuck and Company to defend itself against discrimination charges brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It describes some salient points of the judge's reasoning in the Sears case, noting especially his emphasis on the legal protection of "free choice" and his implicit definition of nondiscrimination in employment as equal respect for men's and women's job choices. In defense, Sears offered several explanations for how the company could end up with a gender-differentiated sales force without having engaged in intentional or unintentional discriminatory hiring. The chapter reexamines the origins of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to see how the protection of "choice" came to seem an essential element of nondiscrimination policy, a value supported inferentially by much social science thinking.