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The Supreme Court on Thursday revived a lawsuit by an Ohio woman who said her bosses discriminated against her for being straight.
The court unanimously ruled that members of majority groups do not face a higher legal standard than minorities to prevail in so-called reverse discrimination lawsuits under Title VII, the federal civil rights law that bars employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex and other protected characteristics.
The decision, written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, comes as President Donald Trump has sought to deploy the nation’s civil rights laws and agencies to combat what he sees as discrimination against white people and other majority groups. The ruling could make it easier for men and white people to successfully sue their employers for job discrimination.
Lower courts had thrown out the lawsuit by Marlean Ames, who alleged that she was passed over for an Ohio state government job and then demoted from her existing post in favor of LGBTQ+ candidates. The lower courts said that members of majority groups suing for discrimination had to show “background circumstances” suggesting that their bosses were among the “rare” group of employers who were biased against the majority. Minorities suing for discrimination were not required to show analogous “background circumstances” about their employers under the legal test that the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals had adopted.
Jackson wrote that the 6th Circuit’s requirement “cannot be squared” with federal civil rights law or other judicial precedent.
“Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” the opinion states.
The decision was an unsparing rebuke of the “background circumstances” test and Ohio’s legal arguments, stating at one point that the state’s defense “misses the mark by a mile.”
Thursday's decision was unsurprising, given that the justices were highly skeptical of the state's position during oral arguments in February.
Jackson’s opinion did not explicitly discuss the implications for cases filed by white people. But Justice Clarence Thomas, a George H.W. Bush appointee, wrote a concurring opinion in which he said that racial discrimination lawsuits brought by white people should not face a higher legal bar than those brought by minorities. Writing that he was “pleased” with the court’s ruling, he argued that the murkiness of racial classifications can make it difficult to determine whether someone is part of the majority.
“Even if courts could identify all the relevant racial groups and their boundaries, courts would still struggle to determine which racial groups make up a majority,” Thomas wrote, in an opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The Supreme Court’s decision Thursday vacated the appeals court’s ruling and sent the case back for further consideration, meaning Ames will get a chance to prove her discrimination claims against the Ohio Department of Youth Services, which runs the state’s juvenile detention centers.
A spokesperson for the Ohio attorney general’s office, which defended the case, said the Supreme Court “made clear that this case is not over,” and it still believes Ames was treated fairly.
“We look forward to fully pressing those arguments as the case moves forward because the Ohio Department of Youth Services did not engage in unlawful discrimination,” spokesperson Dominic Binkley said in a statement.
The state argued previously that Ames was not chosen for the job she applied for and then demoted because she lacked experience relevant to both positions.
In addition to uniting the Supreme Court, the case is also notable for being one in which both the Biden and Trump administrations, as well as conservative groups like America First Legal, all lined up behind the worker and against the “background circumstances” standard.
Some civil rights groups were concerned, however, that doing so could lead to an uptick of meritless “reverse discrimination” cases.
English (US) ·