As I’ve had occasion to note in this space, pundits regularly complain that the current Supreme Court is somehow throttling job-bias lawsuits out of some concern for employers’ rights. However, the Court’s recent rulings on employment discrimination law in fact tend toward the cautious and centrist, and the caseload of discrimination claims filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) remains near its all-time highs. (Thus the New York Times complained in 2013 that a Court decision four years previously had made it hopeless to file age-bias claims, omitting to mention that lawyers filed more such cases after the decision than before.)
Today’s decision in Young v. United Parcel Service, on the scope of pregnancy discrimination and accommodation law, will be hailed reflexively in some quarters on a which-side-are-you-on basis, since the pregnant employee won. Few non-lawyers are likely to stick around for its dry details, in which Justice Stephen Breyer laid out a balancing test mushy enough in its liberalism to win over Chief Justice Roberts and even Justice Alito. (Readers interested in such matters as McDonnell-Douglas burden-shifting and the selection of similarly situated co-worker “comparators” should follow up at the specialty employment-law blogs.) The practical impact of the case is also somewhat limited by Congress’s having further liberalized pregnancy accommodation law in plaintiffs’ favor after the events being sued over.