For The Washington Post

scotus tracker illo

RFK Supreme Court

The Washington Post

The U.S. Supreme Court Hears Arguments in Case Over Emergency Abortion Care in Washington, DC


Coronavirus outbreak, Hollywood, Florida, USA - 04 May 2020

staff

Hill Coverage of April 16, 2024

FTWP

Capitol Riot Sentencing

For The Washington Post 

Panoramic View Of The Borderlands: Southwestern U.S. And Mexico

Staff

Supreme Court

The Supreme Court Decides Confront the Critical Question of Donald Trump's Eligibility to Return to the White House

Supreme Court Guns Bump Stocks

ILLUSTRATION

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Mike Johnson works to boost House GOP funding as ouster threat looms

Election 2024 latest news: Biden heading to Delaware for campaign event; Trump trial resumes

Bill Barr doesn’t mind a little autocracy if your politics are right

Carolyn Hax: Her family left all the kitchen work to her, so she went on strike

Miss Manners: Some audience members ask rambling questions post-lecture

Ask Amy: Why did my friend lie about seeing my ex-girlfriend?

In photos: Flash floods kill over 100 people in Kenya

Americans are sleeping more than ever. See how you compare.

Parenting in Gaza today is so much more than keeping your children alive

Nationals sweep away the Marlins to get back to .500

Blinken calls proposed Israeli cease-fire deal ‘extraordinarily generous’

Jayden Daniels is latest in Washington’s checkered history of first-round QBs

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

Humans might need to re-engineer the climate

King Charles is back at work after cancer diagnosis. He looks good.

In a ‘meat grinder’ of a war, Russian and Ukrainian casualties rise

Middle East conflict live updates: Netanyahu vows to invade Rafah regardless of cease-fire deal; Blinken in region

The Rick Steves guide to life

The sad, stale state of in-flight vegetarian meals

How to train for a marathon on vacation

Apple banned this app for years. It’s now America’s No. 1 iPhone app. 

A TikTok ban could also end short-form video as we’ve come to know it

An AI blood test purports to diagnose postpartum depression

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Facts in the Trump courtroom v. ‘facts’ in the court of public opinion

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Soldiers reunite with their pets from overseas: ‘It meant everything to me’

Trump Hush Money

See more coverage in your recommendations

Get the weekly Campaign Moment newsletter

Set alerts for major election developments

Election 2024

The Campaign Moment newsletter

Politics alerts

Haiyun Jiang

The Supreme Court on Wednesday made it easier for workers to pursue employment discrimination claims over job transfers, unanimously siding with a female police sergeant in St. Louis who said she was reassigned to a less prestigious role because she is a woman.

Federal civil rights law prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics such as sex, race and religion. Congress passed Title VII to ensure equal employment opportunities and to eliminate discrimination in the workplace.

The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/06/supreme-court-sex-discrimination-st-louis-police/" target=_blank>issue for the justices</a> was whether the statute guards against all discriminatory job transfers or requires an additional showing in court by the employee that the involuntary move caused a “significant disadvantage,” such as harm to career prospects or a change in salary or rank.

Justice Elena Kagan, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-193_q86b.pdf" target=_blank>writing for six justices</a>, said that higher standard applied by some lower courts was wrong and employees instead must only show some harm.

“Although an employee must show some harm from a forced transfer to prevail,” Kagan wrote, “she need not show that the injury satisfies a significance test.”

Illustration of a court justice's arm holding a gavel over falling pillars and the roof of the U.S. Supreme Court building surrounded by wetland grasses, graduation caps, outlines of states and a computer cursor. 

We’re tracking <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/supreme-court-cases-abortion-trump-guns/" target=_blank>the major Supreme Court cases of 2024</a>.

In addition to civil rights groups, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/05/supreme-court-diversity-equity-inclusion-muldrow/" target=_blank>employment attorneys and some conservatives</a> had been closely watching the case, believing that a broad ruling for the police sergeant could lead to an increase in reverse-discrimination claims against workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Jatonya Clayborn Muldrow sued the St. Louis Police Department after she was transferred in 2017 out of the intelligence division, from a position that allowed her to be deputized as an FBI agent, work a steady weekday schedule, and broadly investigate public corruption and human trafficking cases.

Muldrow said in court filings that her new assignment lacked the same prestige and benefits. Even though her pay remained the same, she lost her FBI privileges, had to work patrol and was assigned weekend shifts. Muldrow, who according to court filings was known as a “workhorse,” was replaced in the intelligence division by a male sergeant who previously worked with Muldrow’s male supervisor.

In her opinion Wednesday, Kagan wrote that Muldrow’s allegations meet the court’s new standard “with room to spare.”

“If those allegations are proved, she was left worse off several times over. It does not matter, as the courts below thought, that her rank and pay remained the same, or that she still could advance to other jobs,” Kagan wrote.

The decision aims to lower the bar for employees to proceed in court with a discrimination claim, allowing lawsuits that failed under the old standard to presumably succeed.

Although the court’s judgment in favor of Muldrow was unanimous, three justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh — each wrote separately to explain their differences with their colleagues’ reasoning and their view of the ruling’s potential impact.

Alito said he doubted the court’s decision would make a meaningful difference and expects lower court judges will “mind the words they use but will continue to do pretty much just what they have done for years.” He called the opinion “unhelpful” because lower court judges, he wrote, will struggle to apply the new standard of harm.

Thomas also said there was “little practical difference” between the court’s new test and the current practice of appeals court judges.

Kavanaugh said he would have gone further and not required the worker to show they had suffered in any specific way other than being subject to a discriminatory transfer. Federal law, he wrote, “does not require a separate showing of some harm. The discrimination is harm.”

Employment attorneys said the court’s ruling will probably spark a greater number of discrimination claims beyond transfers, including challenges to certain DEI programs, and cause employers to assess whether some of their programs might be vulnerable to challenges under the new “some harm” standard set by the court.

“Does this mean the end of [DEI]? I don’t think so,” said Alyesha Asghar, an attorney with Littler Mendelson and the co-chair of the firm’s practice group for equal employment opportunity and diversity.

Some groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said they doubted the ruling would have an impact on DEI because many employment-related programs do not rely on race.

Rather, such programs are “fundamental to fulfilling employers’ Title VII obligations to create workplaces that are free from discrimination and in which everyone feels included and valued,” said Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel and co-manager of the defense fund’s Equal Protection Initiative.

In Muldrow’s case, a district court judge in Missouri had sided with the city, saying Muldrow had not proved that her transfer caused sufficient disadvantage. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit agreed, finding that Muldrow could not proceed with her lawsuit because she failed to demonstrate that the transfer amounted to an “adverse employment action” that caused tangible harm.

The Supreme Court said Wednesday that nothing in the text of <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964" target=_blank>Title VII</a> requires courts to distinguish between job transfers that cause “significant disadvantages and transfers causing not-so-significant ones.”

“And that difference can make a real difference for complaining transferees. Many forced transfers leave workers worse off respecting employment terms or conditions,” Kagan wrote.

The justice pushed back on concerns from the city that employees would inundate the court system with meritless, burdensome claims. “There is reason to doubt that the floodgates will open in the way feared,” she wrote, because employees must still show some injury.

The Supreme Court’s opinion sends the case, Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, back to the lower courts for additional proceedings that account for the high court’s ruling.

Robert Loeb, the lawyer for the police department, said in a statement he was pleased that the court had retained a requirement that employees show “some harm.” The city “looks forward to showing on remand why [Muldrow] cannot meet that standard,” he said.

Nieman fellow, Harvard University

Cornell University

Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2005, and has spent a decade writing about legal affairs and the federal judiciary. She previously covered state government and politics in California, New Hampshire and Maryland.

Ann Marimow

Humboldt State University, BA in Globalization Studies 

Julian Mark covers breaking business and technology news for The Washington Post. He previously worked overnight with The Post's Morning Mix team. Before joining The Post, he covered housing and policing for Mission Local in San Francisco.  

Julian  Mark

the-washington-post

Biden administration

The Fix

The 202s

Polling

Democracy in America

Balance of Power Pair

U.S. House Aggregate

U.S. Senate Aggregate

Politics

washpost

prism://prism.query/site,/politics/courts-law&limit=20

Courts & Law

Latest news and coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/politics&limit=20

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

Post Politics from The Washington Post is the source for political news headlines, in-depth politics coverage and political opinion, plus breaking news on the biden administration and White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, elections and more.

prism://prism.query/site,/politics/the-fix&limit=6

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/business&limit=20

Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.

Business

The source for business news and analysis. Covering economic policy, business policy, financial news, economic issues, stock market data, local business, technology and more.