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Supreme Court Rebuffs Age-Bias Claims by Faculty
By Hans Johnson
In a decision that exposed deep rifts among its members, the Supreme Court ruled in January that state workers cannot bring federal age-bias claims for monetary damages against their employers, because states have "sovereign immunity" under the Eleventh Amendment. In her opinion for the five-justice majority, Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "Older persons, . . . unlike those who suffer discrimination on the basis of race or gender, have not been subjected to a history of purposeful unequal treatment."
The ruling affected three cases that the Court considered as one. Plaintiffs in the consolidated case, Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, included thirty-six librarians and professors at two state universities in Florida and professors at the University of Montevallo in Alabama. The plaintiffs sued their institutions, alleging age bias under the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967. As workers over the age of forty, they claimed they suffered promotion and pay inequities. The AAUP filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case arguing that states should not be immune under the Eleventh Amendment from age-discrimination suits for monetary damages by professors who work at public institutions.
While unlikely to quell the protests of faculty and other state employees in the wake of the ruling, O'Connor's opinion did note that many state statutes include penalties for age discrimination, providing employees some "avenues of relief." And, as AAUP associate counsel Donna Euben notes, "This particular decision is limited to ADEA claims only, and does not affect race- or gender-discrimination claims."
Yet, as Euben points out, one week after the Kimel ruling, the Court ordered lower courts to reconsider six other cases having universities as defendants, two of which involve the Equal Pay Act. The ruling set off alarm bells that the Court's recent hostility to applying federal civil-rights laws to the states could be extended to some claims of gender bias before long.
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