Thursday, September 1, 2016

Rethinking Sex Discrimination Remedies from a Feminist Perspective

The book US Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the Supreme Court (Kathy Stanchi, Linda Berger, & Bridget Crawford, eds) (Cambridge Univ. Press 2016), is now published.

My contribution was to rewrite the Supreme Court's decision in  City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power v. Manhart, 435 U.S. 702 (1978) regarding sex discrimination in retirement benefits for women.  The department had charged women extra for their retirement benefits because, on average, women live longer than men.  The Court invalidated that practice as violating Title IX.  By then the practice had stopped, due to intervening state law.  The Court however refused to award reimbursement of the discriminatory surcharges.  

Here's an excerpt on the remedies point:

Ubi Jus, Ibi Remedium

            The question remains as to the appropriate relief in this case. It is a standard proposition of law that ubi jus, ibi remedium: “where there’s a right, there must be a remedy.” As we held in the early days of this Court, the very foundations of justice and jurisprudence require that violations of rights are vindicated with meaningful remedies. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). “It is a settled and invariable principle, that every right, when withheld, must have a remedy, and every injury its proper redress.” Id. For in the absence of such tangible, meaningful relief, legal rights become empty, unenforceable aspirations that are not supported with concrete action forcing defendants to internalize the consequences of their wrongful behavior. Without specific consequences, defendants have no incentives to avoid such discriminatory misconduct.

            That is the case here. The Department seeks to avoid all consequences for its history of sex discrimination. While injunctive relief and an intervening California law have ended the use of this discriminatory plan, they do not redress the years of overcharges and lost monies to the plaintiff class. The Civil Rights Act provides that a court in a Title VII case may “order such affirmative action as may be appropriate, which may include, but is not limited to, reinstatement . . . with or without back pay . . . or any other equitable relief as the court deems appropriate.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5. Back pay is limited to two years prior to the filing of the case with the EEOC. Id. at 5(g). Courts also have discretion to award prevailing plaintiffs attorney’s fees. Id. at 5(k). In accordance with the statute, the District Court ordered the refund of all overcharges going back to April 5, 1972, the date of the EEOC regulations. Fair Emp. Prac. Case at 1625. This was a shorter period of time than permitted by the statute, which would have allowed retroactive relief to June 5, 1971. The court also awarded reasonable attorney’s fees.

        While the Department challenges this retroactive refund as inappropriate, the Court has previously established a “presumption in favor of retroactive liability” in Title VII cases which “can seldom be overcome.” Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody, 422 U.S. 405 (1975). The strong presumption is that “the injured party is to be placed, as near as may be, in the situation he would have occupied if the wrong had not been committed.” Id. at 418. Retroactive relief should be denied only “for reasons which, if applied generally, would not frustrate the central statutory purposes of eradicating discrimination throughout the economy and making persons whole for injuries suffered through past discrimination.”  Id. at 421.  Retroactive monetary relief makes plaintiffs whole and provides the consequences for discriminatory conduct and the incentives for required egalitarian treatment. Such retroactive relief is the usual default remedy in both Title VII and the law more generally. The only required showing is loss to the plaintiff. No heightened standard of bad faith or evil intent is required because the statutory purpose is compensatory, not punitive. “If backpay were awardable only upon a showing of bad faith, the remedy would become a punishment for moral turpitude, rather than a compensation for workers’ injuries. This would read the ‘make whole’ purpose right out of Title VII for a worker’s injury is no less real simply because the employer did not inflict it in ‘bad faith.’” Id. at 422. Thus, it is immaterial whether the plan administrators were conscientious or recalcitrant in the face of intervening EEOC guidelines. What is relevant is the economic loss to the plaintiffs from the charges illegally withheld from their paychecks. We measure the amount of this loss by awarding the difference between contributions made by female employees and those made by male employees. While the inability to assess the discriminatory surcharge might have required the Department to adopt a different, undifferentiated actuarial table that would have reassessed contributions for both women and men, we cannot use this hypothetical past to calculate monetary relief nor can we rectify a precise accounting by deducting pay from the checks of the male employees who are not parties to this action. Instead, our goal is to ensure the “employee is placed in no worse a position than if” the conduct had not occurred, and the return of the improper contributions as actually paid is necessary required to provide that meaningful relief as envisioned by Title VII.  Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Ed. v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274, 286 (1977).

            We recently approved such retroactive relief for a class of men in a Title VII case similarly challenging a retirement plan. Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, 427 U.S. 455 (1976). In Fitzpatrick, the Court held that a state retirement plan that allowed women to retire five years earlier than men discriminated on the basis of sex and that the Eleventh Amendment did not bar retroactive payment of retirement benefits as an appropriate remedy. Denying this same retroactive relief in the case here when confronted with a similar discriminatory retirement plan would establish the perverse rule that allows damages for men, but not women. Such a result would clearly “frustrate the central statutory purposes of eradicating discrimination” under Title VII by re-inscribing sex inequality via the remedial mechanism. Albemarle Paper Co., 422 U.S. at 421.  

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/gender_law/2016/09/rethinking-sex-discrimination-remedies-from-a-feminist-perspective.html

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