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The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously struck down a legal standard that had made it harder for white, male, or heterosexual employees to bring workplace discrimination claims, marking a landmark decision that threatens to undercut the legal foundation of many diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices.
The high court struck down a legal test created and employed by certain lower courts since the 1980s called the “background circumstances rule” which requires a heightened evidentiary standard for members of so-called “majority groups” in discrimination cases. In an opinion penned by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court decided that the background circumstances rule is incompatible with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which bars employers from intentionally discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
“As a textual matter, Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs,” Jackson wrote. “Rather, the provision makes it unlawful ‘to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.’ The law’s focus on individuals rather than groups is anything but academic.”
“By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’ — without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group — Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” she continued. “Our precedents reinforce that understanding of the statute.”
The case surrounds Marlean Ames, a heterosexual woman who had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services since 2004 and was originally hired to work as an executive secretary. Ames was eventually promoted to program administrator and applied for a management position in 2019. Ultimately, the agency hired a different candidate, a lesbian woman, to fill the role. A few days later, Ames was demoted back to her secretarial role with a significant pay cut, and the agency hired a gay man to fill her administrator position.
Ames subsequently filed a lawsuit against the agency until Title VII, alleging that she was denied the management promotion and demoted because of her sexual orientation.
A district court sided with the Ohio Department of Youth Services, concluding that Ames failed to provide evidence of “background circumstances” that she was being discriminated against as a member of a “majority group” — a heterosexual. The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s decision.
Conservative-leaning Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, admonishing lower court judges who essentially legislate from the bench.
“I write separately to highlight the problems that arise when judges create atextual legal rules and frameworks. Judge-made doctrines have a tendency to distort the underlying statutory text, impose unnecessary burdens on litigants, and cause confusion for courts. The ‘background circumstances’ rule — correctly rejected by the Court today — is one example of this phenomenon,” Thomas wrote.
“The ‘background circumstances’ rule plainly contravenes that statutory command by imposing a higher burden on some individuals based solely on their membership in a particular demographic group. This rule is a product of improper judicial lawmaking,” he added.
Thomas asserted that courts who have employed the background circumstances rule have “offered no guidance on how to decide whether a particular person is a member of the ‘majority.”‘
“Instead, judges have been left to their own devices to make these challenging determinations. Most courts appear to have sidestepped these difficulties by abandoning the search for neutral principles and instead assuming that the ‘background circumstances’ rule applies only to white and male plaintiffs,” he observed.
Thomas additionally said the high court should consider scrapping the broader legal test from which the background circumstances rule is derived, called the McDonnell Douglas framework. The Supreme Court established the three-pronged test in 1973 for workplace discrimination claims that rest on circumstantial evidence.
“The Court today assumes without deciding that the McDonnell Douglas framework is an appropriate tool for making that determination. But, the judge-made McDonnell Douglas framework has no basis in the text of Title VII. And, as I have previously explained, lower courts’ extension of this doctrine into the summary-judgment context has caused significant confusion and troubling outcomes on the ground,” Thomas wrote.
“In an appropriate case, this Court should consider whether the McDonnell Douglas framework is an appropriate tool to evaluate Title VII claims at summary judgment,” he continued.
The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of Ames’s discrimination claims, instead remanding the case for further litigation in a lower court.
The Supreme Court’s ruling comes as the Trump administration hacks away at the roots of DEI in the federal government and corporate America — standards which have resulted in hiring based on racial and sexual-orientation quotas, trainings, policies, and initiatives espousing the supposed pervasiveness of white supremacy in all of America’s institutions, and the overall demonization of white, heterosexual individuals.
