Good news from the Supreme Court this morning: after taking a beating for its 2007 decision denying Lilly Ledbetter the right to sue her former employer for years of wage discrimination based on a deadline she could not have observed, and for a series of stunning pro-corporate rulings, the Court today handed down two decisions restoring justice to workers who had been denied relief based on technicalities.
In Lewis v. City of Chicago, the Court ruled that 6,000 African American applicants for firefighting jobs in Chicago could sue the city for discrimination, even though the city argued they had filed their complaints too long after the discrimination had taken place (whether or not the discrimination happened was not in question):
In a 9-0 decision, the justices said the city was liable for paying damages to those applicants who had "qualified" scores on the test but were excluded in favor of those who scored higher. Earlier this year, a lawyer for black applicants estimated the total damages in the case could reach $100 million.
The question was whether the city’s discrimination had taken place when it had compiled a discriminatory hiring list (in which case the plaintiffs had missed the filing deadline), or each time it made a hiring decision based on that list (in which case they had sued the city in time). The court ruled the latter.
And in Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Insurance Co., the Court ruled unanimously that an employee who had prevailed in her suit for benefits under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) could gather attorneys’ fees, even though she had not prevailed through a judicial decision. (Her employer had backed down and agreed to pay her compensation before the case was decided by a court).
About 10,000 ERISA lawsuits are filed each year.
President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, filed amicus briefs on behalf of the plaintiffs in both cases.