As my colleague Ilya Shapiro noted last fall in this space, the Cato Institute joined an amicus brief before the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in a case called EEOC v. Kaplan Higher Education. As Ilya summed up the underlying situation:
Following several incidents of employee theft, Kaplan University did what any reasonable employer might do in similar circumstances: it instituted heightened screening procedures for new hires. This process included credit checks to filter out potential employees at greater risk of committing theft. These checks made no mention of any applicant’s race and Kaplan didn’t collect any race information from applicants, thus making the hiring process both race-neutral and race-ignorant. Nevertheless, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which itself uses credit checks in hiring decisions, sued Kaplan under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, claiming that the use of credit checks has an unlawfully disparate impact on African American applicants.
Because Kaplan doesn’t keep racial data for applicants, the EEOC had to come up with its own data to prove its case. The agency thus created a team of “race raters,” a group of seemingly random people who sorted Kaplan’s job applicants into racial categories based only on the applicant’s name and DMV photo. (You can’t make this stuff up!) Because of the unscientific and unreliable nature of this data, the EEOC was soundly rebuffed in the federal district court in Ohio where it brought its case.
Yesterday, in a slapdown that’s already the talk of the legal community, the Sixth Circuit panel rebuffed the federal agency and roundly backed Cato’s view of the case. The ruling is short and sweet — go read it here — but here are a few prime tidbits for those in a hurry:
In this case the EEOC sued the defendants for using the same type of background check that the EEOC itself uses. …
The district court considered every one of the Daubert factors [on expert witness admissibility] — and found that [EEOC expert Kevin] Murphy’s methodology flunked them all. …
The EEOC’s case goes downhill from there. …
We need not belabor the issue further. The EEOC brought this case on the basis of a homemade methodology, crafted by a witness with no particular expertise to craft it, administered by persons with no particular expertise to administer it, tested by no one, and accepted only by the witness himself.
The outcome is a triumph for Seyfarth Shaw attorney Gerald L. Maatman, Jr. a dean of the employment bar, and all the more impressive because one of the three judges on the opinion is liberal lion Damon Keith, about as sympathetic a judicial ear as the EEOC could normally hope for. It’s a sharp setback for the agency’s dubious “disparate impact” campaign against employer use of credit and criminal records in hiring. And it’s also part of a pattern of rebuffs and defeats the EEOC has been dealt by judges across the country since President Obama turned the agency on a sharp leftward course with his appointments. We’ll have more to say about that pattern in future commentaries.
