(FORTUNE Magazine) – Can someone whose mother was born in Romania and whose father was born in what is now Israel sue under federal civil rights law for discrimination as an Hispanic? Yes, said the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a recent decision in a lawsuit against Rutgers University. The suit was filed by an associate professor . . . who contended he was improperly denied promotion to full professor. Rutgers's lawyers argued before the court . . . that Alfred Bennun . . . was not eligible to sue under . . . the U.S. Civil Rights Act . . . because he was not a member of one of the minority groups covered under the act . . . But . . . Judge William O. Hutchinson noted that Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 during the Spanish Inquisition, and ''Bennun's uncontroverted assertion that his father is a Sephardic Jew meets the dictionary definition of Hispanic.'' -- From a news report in Human Resource Executive.