Supreme Court Roundup from Aaron Streett

Greetings, sportsfans! With just one opinion this week, the Court is teeing up an extremely busy June.  Twenty-eight cases remain to be decided, so the Chief will have to start cracking the whip on his colleagues to meet a nearly one-case-a-day-pace if he wishes to finish on time. In other action, the Court cranked up the grant machine once again as it belatedly starts to populate its puny OT ’07 fall docket. Let’s recap the action.

Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 05-1074

Title VII requires a victim of employment discrimination to file a “charge” with the EEOC within 180 days of the discriminatory act; failure bars the plaintiff from bringing a federal lawsuit. Plaintiff Ledbetter received an allegedly sex-discriminatory performance evaluation that caused her to be denied an annual raise, but she failed to file an EEOC charge within 180 days. Instead, she filed a charge years later. She tried to satisfy the 180-day limit by arguing that each subsequent lower paycheck she received was a new discriminatory act since it ultimately resulted from the discriminatory evaluation. She did not, however, argue that Goodyear issued each paycheck with discriminatory intent, simply that Goodyear unknowingly carried forward the effect of the discriminatory evaluation.

Affiriming the CA11, the Court found Ledbetter’s claim barred by her untimely EEOC charge. Justice Alito (+ JGR, AS, AMK, CT) held that a claim accrues, and the 180-day clock starts ticking, when both elements of a Title VII violation occur—a discriminatory act coupled with discriminatory intent. Thus, the clock started running with the initial evaluation and raise denial. The clock did not restart with each subsequent lower paycheck because those paychecks were issued without discriminatory intent. SAA found this result compelled by 4 precedents holding that the continuing effects of past discrimination do not restart the 180-day clock. One of those precedents was a 1977 majority opinion by Justice Stevens, which Alito thoughtfully block-quoted for the benefit of the dissenters. (In fairness to JPS, the opinion was from his conservative days. Oh wait, I forgot, he is still conservative!) The Court also rejected Ledbetter’s argument that Bazemore v. Friday (1976) supported a paycheck-accrual rule, reading that decision as merely finding liability based on paychecks issued with discriminatory intent.  And the Court  rejected an analogy to hostile-work-environment claims, which may be brought within 180 days of the existence of a hostile environment, because Ledbetter’s claim alleged distinct temporal acts, not “a single wrong consisting of a succession of acts.” Finally, SAA declined to consider policy reasons for treating pay claims differently than other discrimination claims: Congress chose to subject all claims to a short, 180-day statute of limitations to prevent stale claims that would require inquiry into an employer’s intent in the distant past.

RBG (+3) dissented, feeling especially lonely for SOC’s fairly reliable vote on sex-discrimination issues. Justice Ginsburg reasoned that pay discrimination is different from other discriminatory employment actions (e.g., termination, non-promotion) because it often becomes apparent only over time, and she distinguished the majority’s precedents on this basis. RBG would treat pay claims more like hostile-environment claims and allow them to be brought within 180 days of any paycheck “infected by gender-based discrimination.” She argued that such an approach would be more consistent with Bazemore and the 1991 Civil Rights Act’s intent to make it easier to challenge the continuing effects of past discriminatory actions. Concerns about stale claims could be addressed through common-law defenses such as laches, RBG thought.  She closed her dissent by inviting Congress “to correct this Court’s parsimonious interpretation of Title VII.”

OPINION WATCH: With SAA’s majority opinion in Ledbetter, only the racial-integration cases remain from December, with only the Chief left to write. Unless he lost his majority, this will likely be the most important opinion of JGR’s young career.

Grants/CVSG

The Court’s 4 grants start with a fairly interesting arbitration question and go downhill rapidly from there.

Hall Street Associates LLC v. Mattel, Inc., 06-989

With this grant, the Court wades into a long-percolating 2-2 circuit split over whether parties may contract for more searching judicial review of an arbitration award than the Federal Arbitration Act provides. CA9 and CA10 say no, because the FAA provides the only terms for judicial review of arbitral awards. CA3 and CA5 say yes, because arbitration is all about enforcing contracts, and parties should be able to contract for more rigorous judicial review if they so choose.

CSX Transportation, Inc. v. Georgia State Board of Equalization, 06-1287

Ever wonder why tax assessors are euphemistically called boards of “equalization.” Well, this case won’t answer that question. But it will tell us whether a railroad may challenge a state’s method for calculating property taxes, as opposed to challenging the application of a given method. In doing so, the Court will have to interpret an Act so dense that Congress did not even bother to bless it with a euphonic acronym: the Railroad Revitalization & Regulatory Reform Act (pronounced Rur-rurr-rah by industry insiders).

John R. Sand & Gravel Co. v. United States, 06-1164

Despite the promising title, this case does not involve a reconsideration of Bedroc v. United States (2004)’s landmark holding that sand and gravel are not “valuable minerals” under federal mining laws. That utterly unimportant case epitomized the fractured decisions of the late Rehnquist Court: The Court split 4-2-3, and a footnote war ensued, with plurality author WHR pointedly citing John Marshall in response to JPS’s dissenting invocation of Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak. But alas, next Term’s sand-and-gravel extravaganza will probably produce no such fireworks. The question presented is whether the Tucker Act’s 6-year statute of limitations for claims against the United States is jurisdictional or may be waived by the government.

Ali v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 06-9130

This case concerns a question so pressing that the Court allowed a 6-4 split to develop before begrudgingly granting it today. The Federal Tort Claims Act’s waiver of sovereign immunity does not cover “the detention of any goods, merchandise, or other property by any officer of customs or excise or any other law enforcement officer.” Might the term “other law enforcement officer” be broad enough to cover a claim against prison officials for losing an inmate’s belongings? The SG hopes so, while inmate Ali understandably sees it differently.

Finally, the Court CVSG’d in United States ex rel. Bly-Magee v. Premo (06-1269), which asks whether public disclosure by a state or local official bars a qui tam False Claims Act suit under 31 U.S.C. § 3730(e)(4)(A). 

All in all, next Term looks positively thrilling so far. Until next time, that’s today’s baseball.

Aaron M. Streett is an associate in the Houston office of Baker Botts LLP and a member of the firm’s Appellate and Supreme Court Practice. The statements, opinions, and subtle emotions expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of Baker Botts LLP; to the extent they are correct, insightful, and not offensive, they most definitely represent the views of the author. 

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