Firefighters Prevail in Major Reverse Discrimination Case
In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the plaintiffs who were suing New Haven, Connecticut in the Ricci v. DeStefano case. A group of seventeen White firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter claimed they were denied the opportunity to be promoted based on their race, after passing the promotional exam only to find that New Haven invalidated the test results because few African American firefighters passed. Although New Haven argued that it acted with the intention of avoiding a potential disparate-impact suit from the minority firefighters who failed to qualify for a promotion, the Supreme Court ruled this act a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 intending to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. “The city rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.
This case proved to be highly anticipated because Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee to replace Justice David H. Souter, was among the appellate judges on the panel that allowed a lower court ruling to stand. Particularly affecting public employers who use civil service examinations, the ruling announced by the court applies to all employers and many procedures used to assess candidates, as well as to rank current employees with the intention of promotion. This case will likely make it significantly more difficult for employers to disregard hiring and promotional test results once these tests are administered, even if they negatively impact a specific minority group in the future.
Justice Kennedy expressed that the heightened standard will now require that employers in narrow circumstances will have to demonstrate that the test in question is, in fact, irrelevant to the job at hand and present “a strong basis in evidence” that using these results would lead to a loss in a disparate-impact suit in order to consider ignoring further test results.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/30scotus.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=firefighters%20supreme%20court%20case&st=cse
