ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 2, 1996 TAG: 9604020082
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
note: lede
The Supreme Court made the nation's employers more vulnerable to being sued for age bias, ruling Monday that some lower courts have been reading a major anti-discrimination law too narrowly.
The unanimous decision said employers who fire workers older than 40 and replace them with significantly younger people may be breaking the law, even if the new employees also are older than 40.
The court reinstated an age-bias claim by a North Carolina man who was fired at age 56 after his supervisor allegedly told him he was ``too damn old for this kind of work.''
The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects workers age 40 and older. Federal appeals courts had split over whether any illegal bias can occur if an employee is fired and replaced by someone older than 40.
But Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the nation's highest court that the replacement employee's age is irrelevant.
``The fact that one person in the protected class has lost out to another person in the protected class is ... irrelevant, so long as he has lost out because of his age,'' Scalia said.
David Gregory, a St. John's University law professor who had studied the case, called the decision ``potentially very significant in this era of corporate downsizing.''
``This will force employers to be more meticulous,'' he said. ``It won't open any floodgates of new litigation, but it will open things up, especially for those who are replaced by their proteges after training them.''
Lower courts had thrown out James O'Connor's lawsuit because after being fired he was replaced by someone age 40 - not 39 or younger.
But Scalia said, ``The fact that a replacement is substantially younger than [O'Connor] is a far more reliable indicator of age discrimination than is the fact that [he] was replaced by someone outside the protected class.''
Scalia noted that the age difference must be significant, but did not offer a specific definition of ``substantially younger.''
He did say that replacing a 68-year-old employee with one who's 65 might be ``very thin'' evidence of age discrimination.
Robin Conrad of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pointed to that language in the ruling to claim ``a substantial victory for the business community.''
``We may find more cases being filed but fewer going to trial,'' she said. ``The scarier prospect was letting anyone over 40 sue.''
Sally Dunaway, a lawyer with the American Association of Retired Persons, called the decision ``a strong message'' that puts employers on notice. She said a ruling that went the other way would have been ``an outrageous result.''
Although the decision focused on firings, it could apply as well to people who contend they were discriminated against in some other way - such as not being hired, or getting demoted or transferred.
In other action, the court:
* Ruled in a Georgia case that a death row inmate's first federal appeal generally cannot be dismissed as an abuse of the legal system, even if it is filed just before a planned execution.
* Agreed to use a Mississippi case to decide whether people whose parental rights have been terminated must be allowed to appeal, even if they cannot afford to pay the court fees.
* Said it will review a voting-rights dispute over how municipal court judges are elected in Monterey County, Calif. A decision could provide important new guidelines for other local elections nationwide.
* Rejected an appeal in which Tennessee officials argued that parents do not have a right to sue their state government for not doing enough to help them collect child-support payments.
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