At the same time, the justices said that such evidence should be kept out of court — some of the time.
The unanimous decision, in an age-discrimination case against Sprint/Nextel, did not answer the bottom-line question in the case: whether five co-workers of the plaintiff, Ellen Mendelsohn, should have been allowed to testify. All had lost their jobs in the same reduction in force and claimed, as she did, to be victims of age discrimination.
But the way the court analyzed the case, in a somewhat cryptic nine-page opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, may prove more significant in the long run than the absence of a specific answer.
Because the five would-be witnesses worked for, and were dismissed by, different supervisors, the Federal District Court in Kansas City, Kan., said their experiences were irrelevant and should not be admitted. The district court indicated, in fact, that such evidence should never be admitted.
The United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, overturned that decision, ordering the testimony admitted and indicating that evidence of this kind from the co-workers of a plaintiff in a discrimination case should always be permitted.
The significance of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which vacated the 10th Circuit’s decision, lay in its rejection of both categorical approaches.
The question of whether evidence of discrimination by other supervisors should be admitted in an individual case “is fact based and depends on many factors,” Justice Thomas wrote. A district court, he said, should make a “fact-intensive, context-specific inquiry” to determine the relevance of the evidence and whether it might be unduly prejudicial to the defendant.
Further, he said, appeals courts should generally defer to the district court’s conclusion. But he continued that in this case, Sprint/United Management Company v. Mendelsohn, No. 06-1221, the basis for the district court’s decision was so “ambiguous” that the appeals court lacked an adequate basis on which to evaluate it.
The appeals court was correct to reject a categorical rule of exclusion if that was in fact what the district court invoked, Justice Thomas said. In vacating the appeals court’s decision, the justices ordered the district court to “clarify the basis for its evidentiary ruling.”
While technically a victory for the employer, because an adverse ruling was vacated, the decision is likely to prove more favorable in the long run to discrimination plaintiffs. That is because many lower courts, taking an approach similar to that of the Kansas district court, have been dismissing cases, granting summary judgment to employers on the ground that co-workers’ testimony, which often provides the strongest proof of a pattern of discrimination, is inadmissible.
Under the Supreme Court’s case-by-case approach, plaintiffs will have a greater chance of surviving summary judgment and getting their cases before a jury.
“It’s a big deal that portends a real change,” Eric Schnapper, a law professor at the University of Washington who was one of Ms. Mendelsohn’s lawyers, said Tuesday. Because juries are often sympathetic to plaintiffs claiming discrimination, employers usually focus on getting cases dismissed before trial.
While this case concerned the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the
decision will also apply to lawsuits that are based on the federal laws
against race and sex discrimination in the workplace.