Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Author:Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520381926
Publisher: University of California Press

LEDBETTER V. GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER CO. (2007)

In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the Supreme Court had to decide what time limitations exist on an employee’s ability to file a pay discrimination claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The plaintiff in the case, Lilly Ledbetter, sued Goodyear, her employer, contending that she had been paid less than her male counterparts in violation of Title VII for much of her almost twenty years with the company. In an opinion for a five-justice majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., held that a party must file any complaint under the Title VII framework within 180 days of a challenged “discrete unlawful practice.” It followed, on the majority’s view, that Ledbetter could not challenge any pay discrimination that may have pre-dated such period. Bolstering this conclusion, the majority rejected Ledbetter’s argument that Title VII treated any current pay disparity as the product of longstanding and cumulative discrimination.

Writing on behalf of four dissenting justices, Justice Ginsburg believed, as she phrases it in her bench announcement that follows, that “the Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.” As she viewed matters, “Title VII was meant to govern real-world employment practices, and that world is what the Court today ignores. Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; only over time is there strong cause to suspect that discrimination is at work.” For this reason, she argues in her dissent that follows that the majority’s “cramped interpretation of Title VII” is entirely “at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure.” Ever hopeful, Justice Ginsburg concludes her opinion by pointing out that Congress had the power to “correct this Court’s parsimonious reading of Title VII.”

It took Congress little time to take up Justice Ginsburg’s invitation and enact the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, codified at 42 U. S.C. § 2000e–5(e)(3)(A), which became one of the first bills President Obama signed into law after taking office in January 2009.

Justice Ginsburg’s statement read from the bench on the day the Court announced its decision, along with her dissenting opinion, follow.

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