Supreme Court

This afternoon I’m headed to the Lincoln Memorial for the 50th Anniversary celebration of the March on Washington. Today’s event is both a commemoration and call to action. Thousands are gathering to remember the 1963 March and to outline the remaining civil rights agenda. Read more »

August 26th marks Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment prohibiting U.S. citizens from being denied the right to vote on account of sex. The 19th amendment is widely known for giving women the right to vote. Read more »

On July 30, George Miller, the senior Democratic member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, introduced the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act, or POWADA, which would restore vital civil rights protections for older workers by reversing the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Gross v. FBL Financial. POWADA reestablishes that once a victim shows discrimination was a “motivating factor” behind a decision, the burden is properly on the employer to show it complied with the law.

The Gross decision made it nearly impossible to prove age discrimination by requiring that victims prove that age was not only a factor in an employer’s decision but was the decisive factor (this is also known as “but-for causation” meaning that but-for the age discrimination, the employer would have made a different decision). The Gross decision has had wide-reaching effects: just this year, the Supreme Court applied the higher standard of proof to claims of retaliation in University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar (applying but-for causation test to claims of retaliation under Title VII), and, as in Gross, expressed skepticism at the intelligence of jurors and lower court judges in Vance v. Ball State University (restricting the definition of ‘supervisor’ under Title VII). Read more »

This Term, the Supreme Court issued some major victories but also some heartbreaking setbacks in cases with important implications for women. Read more »

Cross-posted from ACS Blog

You may have missed it in the flurry of news-making by the Supreme Court this week, but on Monday, five of the Justices gave early Christmas presents to defendants accused of employment discrimination, when the Court handed down important decisions in two Title VII cases: Vance v. Ball State University and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar. In both Vance and Nassar, the 5-4 decisions ignored the realities of the workplace and the ways in which employment discrimination and harassment play out every day. Placing new obstacles in the path of workers seeking to vindicate their rights, the Court set aside the longstanding interpretations of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the agency charged with enforcing Title VII), and closed out a term in which the Court repeatedly limited the ability of individuals to challenge the actions of powerful corporations. 

Justice Alito wrote the Vance decision. Prior cases have held that when a plaintiff shows she was sexually harassed, or racially harassed, or harassed on some other unlawful basis by a supervisor, her employer is liable, unless the employer can prove that the plaintiff unreasonably failed to take advantage of a process that the employer provided for addressing harassment. An employer is only liable for harassment by a co-worker, however, when a plaintiff can show that the employer was negligent in controlling working conditions — a far tougher standard. Vance posed the question of who is a supervisor: Is it only someone who has the authority to hire, fire, or take other tangible employment actions? Or is it anyone who oversees and directs the plaintiff’s work on a day-to-day basis? Read more »

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's historic ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius,  the Court upheld the constitutionality of two major provisions of the ACA: the individual mandate and the Medicaid eligibility expansion. However, the Court made one very significant change to the terms of the Medicaid provision: It held that the federal government could not condition a state's current federal Medicaid funding on participation in the coverage expansion, thereby giving states the choice to opt-out of covering more people through Medicaid. 

Today, Medicaid programs in all states cover low-income individuals with disabilities, seniors, children, pregnant women, and parents. But federal money provided through the ACA will enable states to reach people younger than 65 whose income is below 138 percent of the federal poverty guideline ($15,856 annually for an individual; $26, 951 for a family of three in 2012). 

For the first time, low-income childless adults will have access to Medicaid coverage in many states. 

If all states take this federal money, approximately 15.1 million currently uninsured adults [PDF] would newly qualify for Medicaid coverage. Covering more people through the Medicaid program is especially important for low-income women who make up over 60 percent of uninsured women in the U.S. and are four times more likely than higher income women to report fair or poor health.  Read more »

Today, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which provided that only a marriage between a man and woman would be recognized under federal law. The Court found that this provision of DOMA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. This decision is historic in its recognition that the Constitution provides important protection against discrimination against same-sex relationships. 

Moreover, this ruling will have a huge practical impact, providing access to important benefits previously denied to same-sex couples. As the Court wrote, "By its great reach, DOMA touches many aspects of married and family life, from the mundane to the profound." The practical impact of this victory is particularly significant for women. Women make up about 53% of LGBT adults and 51% of same-sex couples, and women in same-sex couples are more likely than men to marry their partners. In fact, the Williams Institute found that 62% of same-sex couples who married or acquired some other type of formal legal status were female, in the eight states for which data is available. 

Because women are more likely than men to be poor, female same-sex couples are at particular risk of financial instability. Read more »

It’s a good week for residents of Arizona!

Just a few days ago, the Arizona state legislature passed Governor Jan Brewer’s Medicaid expansion proposal, bringing health care coverage to 238,000 low-income Arizonans.

And yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down an opinion that will make it easier for Arizonans to exercise their right to vote.

This morning the Supreme Court decided Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc. In this closely-watched case, Arizona residents and civil rights groups challenged a state law that made it harder to vote. The controversial law put the burden on would-be voters to affirmatively prove their U.S. citizenship in order to register.

This law and others like it are serious threats to our right to vote, and they are especially harmful to women voters. Recent studies show that these restrictive voter registration laws disproportionately affect women, who often lack proof of citizenship in their current legal names. Only 66% of voting-age women with access to documents proving citizenship have documents in their current legal names, and only 48% of these women can show birth certificates with their current legal names [PDF]. Women also make up the majority of college students and senior citizens – both populations that are less likely to have qualifying forms of identification. Restrictive voting laws like Arizona’s require these women to jump through hoops in order to register, expending time and money to obtain the necessary documentation. Read more »

On Tuesday, in Genesis Healthcare Corp v. Symczyk, the Supreme Court struck a blow to collective actions under the Fair Labors Standards Act (“FLSA”). In a 5-4 decision, the Court held that courts lack jurisdiction to hear collective action cases if the named plaintiff’s (or plaintiffs’) own claims are “moot.” Under the FLSA, collective actions are similar to class actions in that they allow plaintiffs to sue on behalf other unnamed, but similarly situated, individuals, but collective actions do not require many of the stringent limitations imposed on class actions (such as numerosity or typicality of claims). The Supreme Court’s decision means that if the named plaintiff no longer has a “personal stake” in the case and no other individuals have yet joined the case, no relief is available to the group and the case must end, even though the named plaintiff’s complaint sought damages for a group and not solely for herself. Read more »

For forty years, the Supreme Court has held that the government may not impose laws that treat men and women differently based on an ‘interest’ in perpetuating traditional gender roles. The Court should also hold that the government may not decide who is permitted to marry based on traditional gender stereotypes about who men and women should love, the National Women’s Law Center argued in an amicus brief filed today in Hollingsworth v. Perry—the case in which the Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that overturned the California Supreme Court's ruling that same-sex couples have a right to marry. Tomorrow, the Center will file the same brief in United States v. Windsor, the case before the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that bars the federal government from recognizing marriages of same-sex couples. Read more »