It’s hard to tell what’s worse about a case decided earlier this week by a federal judge in Erie, Pa. – that the judge overturned a perfectly reasonable physical fitness test for new police officers on the grounds that it was too hard for women to meet the standard, or that the Bush administration’s justice department filed the suit that led to the ruling. Either way, it’s bad news that the federal government and the federal courts are in the business of dictating how local police departments go about hiring new officers.

The case centers on a physical trial administered between 1996 and 2002 in which prospective officers had to run an obstacle course by scaling four- and six-foot walls, climbing through a window, wriggling through a crawl-space, doing 17 push-ups and nine sit-ups, and then shooting a service revolver held at arm’s length from first one hand and then the other. It was a rigorous test, and 29% of the men who attempted it during that period failed it. But because the failure rate for women was 87%, Judge Sean McLaughlin, a Clinton appointee, concluded that it was discriminatory. Moreover, the court decided that such discrimination was not permissible in this case because the judge couldn’t find any relationship between the test criteria and the demands of beat policing.

Such cases hinge on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlaws employment criteria that have a “disparate impact” on persons of different races or sexes. Such disparate impacts are illegal even if there is no suggestion that the employer was trying to discriminate by implementing the test. The only exception kicks in if an employer can prove that the criteria are consistent with “business necessity.” It’s up to lawyers to argue over, and judges to decide, whether the employer has met that burden.

It’s a highly subjective process since it can be hard to draw clear lines in a court room about precisely what skills are needed to perform a job. For example, would-be officers in New York must take a written exam, a section of which requires them to answer 10 highly specific questions about a photograph from memory. Keen skills of observation and a good memory are important attributes for police officers, but if this section of the test ever came under such scrutiny, how could anyone say that 10 questions satisfied the “business necessity” standard but 11 or 12 were excessive?

The law relies on prosecutors and judges to be reasonable, an expert on employment law and vice president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, Roger Clegg, told us. Yet it can be impossible for police departments to know whether a test will pass muster because the Justice Department has never been able to issue clear guidelines on what requirements are and aren’t discriminatory, an employment lawyer, Michael Carvin, of the firm Jones Day, said. Departments also face a conundrum because while physical tests disadvantage women, written tests tend to disadvantage minority applicants, meaning departments are damned whichever route they go.

Mr. Clegg credits President Bush’s administration for being better about this kind of case than that of his predecessor, but it still brings these lawsuits periodically. The Erie case was filed in 2004, although the investigation had started in 1996. Judges and lawyers all too often claim they know more about policing than do police departments. Cases such as last March’s Atlanta courthouse shooting, in which a six-foot-tall, 210-pound man allegedly overpowered a five-foot tall deputy to take her gun to go on a rampage, remind that physical attributes can have life-and-death consequences in police work. We’d all be better off if local authorities were allowed to set their own rules.