Category Archives: Supreme Court Decisions

Supreme Court Decisions

Supreme Court: All federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex also outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity

Big decision by the Supremes today re: Title VII of civil rights act!

Here’s an op ed by Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law: https://news.yahoo.com/op-ed-supreme-court-victory-175702939.html

From the op-ed by Erwin Chemerinsky:

The decision is hugely important in protecting gay, lesbian and transgender individuals from discrimination in workplaces across the country. But its significance is broader than that. It should be understood to say that all federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex also outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.


Here is decision itself:
https://d2qwohl8lx5mh1.cloudfront.net/8hVHe52Cq4sPdF0wEaTaCQ/content

From the Supreme Court decision itself: (page 13):

From the ordinary public meaning of the statute’s language at the time of the law’s adoption, a straightforward rule emerges: An employer violates Title VII when it intentionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex. It doesn’t matter if other factors besides the plaintiff ’s sex contributed to the decision. And it doesn’t matter if the employer treated women as a group the same when compared to men as a group. If the employer intentionally relies inpart on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee—put differently, if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer—a statutory violation has occurred. Title VII’s message is “simple but momentous”: An individual employee’s sex is “not relevant to the selection, evaluation, orcompensation of employees.” Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U. S. 228, 239 (1989) (plurality opinion).

The statute’s message for our cases is equally simple and momentous: An individual’s homosexuality or transgenderstatus is not relevant to employment decisions. That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.