In one, the court relaxed a filing deadline that had served to deny benefits to disabled veterans. In the other, it made it easier for military personnel to sue private employers for discriminating against them based on hostility to their service.
The first case, Henderson v. Shinseki, No. 09-1036, concerned David L. Henderson, who was discharged from the military in 1952 after receiving a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. He sought additional government help for his condition in 2001, and he was turned down in 2004.
Mr. Henderson missed a 120-day deadline to file an appeal by 15 days. He attributed the lapse to the very disability for which he had sought help.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Washington, said the deadline could not be waived in light of a 2007 decision from the Supreme Court, Bowles v. Russell. That 5-to-4 decision said filing deadlines in ordinary civil cases could not be waived even when the late filing was the product of erroneous instructions from a judge.
Tuesday’s decision did not disturb the ruling in Bowles. Rather, it said the procedures in cases involving veterans’ disabilities warranted different treatment.
“Bowles concerned an appeal from one court to another court,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the court. Mr. Henderson’s appeal, by contrast, was from an agency determination and was filed in a specialized tribunal “as part of a unique administrative scheme,” he wrote.
The first kind of appeal “has long been understood to be jurisdictional,” meaning that the deadlines for filing appeals are inflexible, Justice Alito said. But Congress did not intend to impose such a strict rule in the second setting, he said.
“The solicitude of Congress for veterans is of long standing,” Justice Alito wrote.
Mr. Henderson died in October, while his case was pending in the Supreme Court.
The second case, Staub v. Proctor Hospital, No. 09-400, concerned the interpretation of the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on membership in or an obligation to perform “uniformed service.” The law is similar to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, sex and other factors.
Vincent Staub, an Army reservist and a civilian technician at an Illinois hospital, sued after he was fired by the hospital, saying his military status was a motivating factor in his termination. There was evidence that two of Mr. Staub’s supervisors were hostile to him because his military duties had caused him to be absent from work one weekend a month and two or three weeks a year.
But it was not clear that the human resources officer who actually fired Mr. Staub knew of or shared that animus.
A jury awarded Mr. Staub about $58,000, but the federal appeals court in Chicago reversed, saying the connection between the supervisors’ hostility and the human resources official’s action was too attenuated. The question before the Supreme Court was what a plaintiff in these circumstances needs to prove when pursuing what the courts call a “cat’s paw” theory.
(The term, Justice Antonin Scalia explained in his decision for the court, “derives from a fable conceived by Aesop, put into verse by La Fontaine in 1679 and injected into United States employment discrimination law by” Judge Richard A. Posner in 1990. In the fable, a monkey persuades a cat to retrieve roasting chestnuts from a fire. The cat burns its paws, and the monkey gets the chestnuts.)
Justice Scalia said that the appeals court’s approach was too mechanical and that companies may be held liable where one employee lays the groundwork for another’s decision to fire a worker. He left to the appeals court whether to reinstate the jury verdict in Mr. Staub’s case or order a new trial.
Justice Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that he agreed with the result reached by the majority but would give employers more leeway than the majority had.
Justice Elena Kagan did not participate in either decision.