Supremes change race ruling in key case before the Court
Judge Sotomayor, famously, was one of three judges on an appellate panel who applied their federal circuit’s settled precedent to rule in New Haven’s favor. Like that decision or hate it, cheer Monday’s ruling or deplore it, one thing that is clear from reading the Supreme Court’s 89 pages of opinions in the case is that Judge Sotomayor and her colleagues played by the old rules, and the court changed them. Although “Sotomayor Reversed” was a frequent headline on the posts that spread quickly across the Web, it was actually the Supreme Court itself that shifted course.
To understand the nature of the shift requires a bit of history. Congress enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the statute at issue in the Ricci case, with a simple command to employers: thou shalt not discriminate on the basis of race or other protected characteristics, including sex and religion. But the simple proved to be complicated. An employer of blue-collar workers in North Carolina, Duke Power, required a high school diploma of all job applicants, a requirement that screened out 88 percent of black men in that region at that time.
In a 1971 decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a test that was “fair in form, but discriminatory in operation” could violate Title VII even without proof that the discrimination was intentional. Congress eventually amended Title VII to codify that decision, Griggs v. Duke Power. The rule was clear: if a job requirement produced a “disparate impact,” the employer had the burden of showing that the requirement was actually necessary.
Federal agencies, in turn, stepped forward to define the statistical disparity that prompted the further inquiry. Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s “four-fifths rule,” a test that one racial group passed at less than 80 percent the rate of another group would place an employer in presumptive violation of Title VII.
The early Supreme Court decision and later Congressional ratification represented a highly visible social settlement in the employment discrimination area. But beginning in the 1990s, changes in the Supreme Court’s membership and outlook began to unravel not only the legal structure, but also the philosophic one that had kept the settlement intact.
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To understand the nature of the shift requires a bit of history. Congress enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the statute at issue in the Ricci case, with a simple command to employers: thou shalt not discriminate on the basis of race or other protected characteristics, including sex and religion. But the simple proved to be complicated. An employer of blue-collar workers in North Carolina, Duke Power, required a high school diploma of all job applicants, a requirement that screened out 88 percent of black men in that region at that time.
In a 1971 decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a test that was “fair in form, but discriminatory in operation” could violate Title VII even without proof that the discrimination was intentional. Congress eventually amended Title VII to codify that decision, Griggs v. Duke Power. The rule was clear: if a job requirement produced a “disparate impact,” the employer had the burden of showing that the requirement was actually necessary.
Federal agencies, in turn, stepped forward to define the statistical disparity that prompted the further inquiry. Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s “four-fifths rule,” a test that one racial group passed at less than 80 percent the rate of another group would place an employer in presumptive violation of Title VII.
The early Supreme Court decision and later Congressional ratification represented a highly visible social settlement in the employment discrimination area. But beginning in the 1990s, changes in the Supreme Court’s membership and outlook began to unravel not only the legal structure, but also the philosophic one that had kept the settlement intact.