WASHINGTON — Government employees who are singled out for arbitrary, irrational or even vindictive treatment by their supervisors will find no relief in the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, unless the mistreatment is due to discrimination on the basis of race, sex or another protected category.
The 6-to-3 decision, with an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., rejected the argument that an individual employee who is not the victim of group-based discrimination can nonetheless suffer a denial of equal protection within the meaning of the 14th Amendment.
A cryptic Supreme Court decision eight years ago had accepted the theory that an individual can comprise a “class of one” for equal protection purposes and can sue a government agency for mistreatment that has no objectively rational explanation.
That case concerned a zoning decision in Illinois, in which one homeowner was required to give a 33-foot easement to be connected to the public water supply, while all her neighbors were assessed only 15 feet. Such “irrational and wholly arbitrary treatment” could be the basis for an equal protection case, the court said then in a unanimous, unsigned opinion.
That decision, Village of Willowbrook v. Olech, appeared to mark a new departure in equal protection doctrine. But at only five paragraphs long, it did not begin to cover the landscape. The question soon arose whether the principle it announced applied to government employment as well as to government regulation. Nearly every federal appeals court to consider that question answered yes, but on Monday the Supreme Court said no.
The “class-of-one theory of equal protection” was “simply a poor fit in the public employment context,” Chief Justice Roberts said, explaining that the government needed “broad discretion” to make “subjective and individualized” decisions concerning its work force.
“To treat employees differently is not to classify them in a way that raises equal protection concerns,” the chief justice said, adding: “A challenge that one has been treated individually in this context, instead of like everyone else, is a challenge to the underlying nature of the government action.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens objected that the majority “carves a novel exception out of state employees’ constitutional rights.” There is a “clear distinction between an exercise of discretion and an arbitrary decision,” he said.
The Equal Protection Clause protects people against “unequal and irrational treatment at the hands of the state,” Justice Stevens continued. He said that “even if some surgery were truly necessary to prevent governments from being forced to defend a multitude of equal protection ‘class of one’ claims, the court should use a scalpel rather than a meat-axe.” Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the dissent.
The case, Engquist v. Oregon Department of Agriculture, No. 07-474, was brought by an Oregon state employee, Anup Engquist. Ms. Engquist, a native of India, was dismissed from the laboratory job she had held for 10 years. She filed a federal lawsuit claiming, in addition to discrimination on the basis of race, sex and national origin, that she had been dismissed simply for “arbitrary, vindictive, and malicious reasons” by a supervisor who disliked her.
The jury, after an 11-day trial, rejected her claims of group-based discrimination, but accepted her “class of one” theory and awarded $425,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, overturned the verdict on the ground that the class-of-one theory did not extend to government employment.
The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling. “The class-of-one theory of equal protection does not apply in the public employment context,” Chief Justice Roberts said. Quoting a 1976 Supreme Court decision that the Bush administration had cited in the brief it filed on behalf of Oregon, the chief justice said: “The federal court is not the appropriate forum in which to review the multitude of personnel decisions that are made daily by public agencies.”
Ms. Engquist’s Supreme Court appeal attracted considerable attention. A brief filed by a coalition of gay rights and disability rights groups maintained that the class-of-one theory of equal protection was particularly important for groups like theirs, which in contrast to groups defined by race, religion, sex or national origin have not been accorded specially protected status by the court.
In other action on Monday, the court agreed to decide whether a law known as Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges that receive federal money, provides the exclusive route to court for discrimination victims.
This case, Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee, No. 07-1125, is an appeal by the parents of a kindergarten student in Hyannis, Mass., who was sexually harassed on the school bus by an 8-year-old boy. (Under Supreme Court precedents, sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination.) The parents sued after concluding that school officials had not responded appropriately to their complaint about their daughter’s treatment.
The lower courts ruled that Title IX, which does not encompass suits against individuals and also contains a number of other limitations, provided the exclusive remedy. The question is whether the parents can also invoke the much broader and more straightforward federal civil rights law known as Section 1983. The intersection of these two statutes is a complex issue that is likely to attract considerable attention in the education world.