Education Law

Two more Supreme Court decisions that matter to schools

Last week, BoardBuzz got word of another couple of Supreme Court rulings in which NSBA had submitted friend-of-the-court briefs. Both of these decisions were age discrimination cases.

In Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, the court said that in a case in which employees claim their employer's decision had an unfair impact on older workers, the employer has the burden of proof when it argues that its decision actually was based on permissible "reasonable factors other than age." For its part, NSBA, with pro bono assistance from Hogan & Hartson school lawyers, had warned the justices about further encumbering public school employment decisions with legal complications at a critical time of great change in public education—change that is forcing school boards to make tough decisions that sometimes may happen to have more impact on older employees, but not for any nefarious reason. The court acknowledged employer concerns were legit, but basically said they should be directed to Congress: "We have to read it the way Congress wrote it." More details on the ruling, background on the case, and NSBA's brief are here.

The same day, in Kentucky Retirement System v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the court rejected the idea that a retirement system automatically "discriminates because of age" just because it bases pension eligibility in part on age and treats employees differently based in part on their pension status. NSBA's take on this one, with a pro bono hand from school lawyers from Minnesota's Johnson & Condon, was that if the court were to come out the other way, it would threaten thousands of school district retirement plans, which were not based on the kind of arbitrary stereotypes the federal age discrimination law is intended to address. The court found that Kentucky's system is not based on such stereotypes, has a non-age-related reason for the disparity challenged here, and in other cases actually treats older employees better than younger ones. The details and background on this one are here.

Interesting presidential election year sidenote: For those on both sides of the partisan world who like to boil down the important issue of Supreme Court appointments into convenient soundbites to rile up their respective bases, these cases aren't especially helpful. As Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times points out, employers have come up short quite a bit this term, despite the "right-wing" court. And look at how the votes came out in the KRS case: on one side, Breyer, Roberts, Stevens, Souter, and Thomas—on the other, Kennedy, Scalia, Ginsburg, and Alito. Try making that one about "liberal" vs. "conservative" judges!

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on June 24, 2008 (boomark / email).