High Court Narrows Scope of Another Civil Rights Law

The Supreme Court’s conservative bloc narrowed the scope of another civil rights law Thursday, ruling that public employees who suffer racial bias may not win damages from a local government agency unless they can prove that its top officials had a “policy or custom” of discrimination.

The 5-4 ruling means that teachers, police officers or other city workers will not be able to win money from a school district, city or county simply because they suffered racial discrimination at the hands of a supervisor.

The employees can win a damage suit against the individual supervisor, the court said, but they cannot win damages from the agency itself without proving that the top officials were to blame. Only if racial discrimination was a “standard operating procedure” for top policy-making officials can an employee win a damage verdict against the agency, the court said.

Civil rights lawyers said the ruling cuts back the prevailing interpretation of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, making it harder for public employees to gain redress for discrimination.

“They have done it again. This is another ruling that just makes it more difficult to get a remedy for discrimination,” said Penda Hair, staff attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Washington. In practical terms, there is often no reason to sue a discriminatory supervisor because a plaintiff, even if successful, will not be able to win much in damages, she said.

But lawyers for cities downplayed the ruling, saying it affects few cases and merely brings the 1866 law into line with other recent court rulings.

“I wouldn’t call this a surprise and I don’t think it will have much practical significance,” said Carter Phillips, a Washington lawyer who has represented local governments before the Supreme Court. “It seems to me that it makes sense to say that you are not going to impose liability on a city where there was no city policy that you are objecting to.”

Last year, the high court said a city employee who was fired for exercising his free speech rights cannot win damages from the city itself without proving that a top city policy-maker was to blame for his dismissal. The ruling was based on the Civil Rights Act of 1871, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which permits suits against people who violate another’s constitutional rights. Since 1978, the court has defined a municipality as a “person” under this law.

Thursday’s ruling focused on the more narrow 1866 act, which forbids racial discrimination.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the court, applied the standard set in the 1871 law to the 1866 law. Since the two laws were “designed to punish only the official commiting a violation,” not the government itself, most suits should be limited to individuals, she said. However, an employee can win a damage verdict against a local governmental agency if he or she can prove that its top officials had a policy, a custom, or a “longstanding practice” of treating employees in a discriminatory manner.

The alleged victim of discrimination in the case was a Dallas high school’s white football coach who was dismissed by a black principal. He was subsequently transferred to a lesser position at another school by the district superintendent.

The coach filed a racial discrimination suit and a jury awarded him $150,000 against the principal and $650,000 against the school district. The principal, who settled with the former coach for an undisclosed sum, did not figure in the ruling.

Vacating the award against the school district, the justices sent the case back to Dallas for a new trial to determine if the school superintendent who approved the coach’s transfer had a policy, custom, or practice of racial discrimination.

In an angry dissent, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. complained that the court was doing away with the 1866 law. Last week, the court said the law did not forbid all racial discrimination in the private sector, but only bias in the “making of contracts.” This week, the court limited its use for public employees, he said, which “raises the possibility that this landmark civil-rights statute affords no civil redress at all.” He was joined in dissent in the case (Jett vs. Dallas Independent School District, 87-2084) by Justices Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens.