Litigation

Supreme Court Takes Employment Discrimination Issue

By Branham & Day

An important employment law question will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court with a couple of Nashville lawyers on the case. The issue is “cat’s paw” liability and the employer is represented by Todd Presnell and Kara Shea in the Nashville office of Miller & Martin PLLC.

The so-called cat’s paw occurs in discrimination matters when another person (here the manager/employer) is held liable for the bias of someone else (here a subordinate employee) which influenced the adverse employment decision made by the manager. So, in this situation, an African American employee was terminated by a human resources manager based mainly on information from the employee’s direct supervisor. The HR manager was in a different location and did not know the employee’s race. The EEOC, which brought the case, alleged that the employee’s direct supervisor was racially biased and motivated the HR manager’s termination decision. The cat’s paw comes into play because the decision maker is acting as a conduit for the discriminatory bias of someone else.

The formal question presented to the Supremes is: "Under what circumstances is an employer liable under federal anti-discrimination laws based on a subordinate’s discriminatory animus, where the person(s) who actually made the adverse employment decision admittedly harbored no discriminatory motive toward the impacted employee."

Hopefully, the court will give clear guidance on this issue since the federal circuits have been split. The case is BCI Coca-Cola Bottling Co. v. EEOC and comes from the Tenth Circuit, which reversed the district court’s dismissal. Oral argument will take place in the Spring.

Full post as published by Tennessee Business Litigation Law Blog on January 19, 2007 (boomark / email).