Court to Decide if ’91 Rights Law Covers Prior Suits

The Supreme Court announced Monday it would decide whether the Civil Rights Act of 1991 can be applied retroactively to hundreds of lawsuits in which workers say they were subjected to race or gender discrimination before the new law took effect.

A ruling, due next year, could result in huge damage verdicts against some companies.

The 1991 law gave women workers the right to win financial awards if they were denied a job or a promotion because of their gender or were sexually harassed on the job. Such acts were illegal before 1991, but victims could only hope to gain a judicial order demanding the discrimination end.

The new law also gave employees the right to seek damages for on-the-job racial discrimination.

In November, 1991, President George Bush signed the new law into effect after having battled the Democrat-controlled Congress over its provisions for nearly two years. But the Democrats and Bush’s aides failed to reach agreement on a key issue: Did the new damage remedies in the law apply to cases that already were in the legal pipeline?

That question will be answered in two cases before the high court, one involving racial discrimination at a trucking firm in Ohio and a second involving sexual harassment at a film processing center in Texas.

No statistics are available on how many cases would be affected, but civil rights lawyers say the number could be in the thousands.

“We have counted already 350 reported decisions” by judges on whether the law can be applied retroactively, said Richard Seymour of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. He added that as many as 8,000 job discrimination claims are filed each year, many of which take years to wind their way through the courts.

So far, the vast majority of judges who have considered the issue have ruled that the law does not apply to discrimination that occurred before November, 1991.

But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in California, took exception and ruled recently that the law can be applied to cases that are still pending on appeal. Reports of that ruling prompted the Supreme Court to agree to resolve the issue.

In the Ohio trucking case, Maurice Rivers, an experienced black mechanic, was fired in 1986 after 14 years of service. He contended that he was dismissed after suffering racial discrimination on the job. But in 1989 a judge threw out his lawsuit based on a recent Supreme Court decision saying that the law did not cover on-the-job racial discrimination.

Congress specifically reversed this decision in the 1991 measure. But a federal appeals court nonetheless ruled last year that this act could not be applied retroactively to benefit the fired mechanic. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed an appeal, however, and the justices said they would hear the case. (Rivers vs. Roadway Express, 92-938).

In the Texas case, the judges who heard the facts agreed that Barbara Landgraf had been subjected to “significant sexual harassment” by her supervisor from 1984 to 1986. But in May, 1991, a federal judge denied her request for damages under the law as it then stood.

A year later, when a federal appeals court considered the matter, the new civil rights law had taken effect, but the appellate judges ruled that it could not be applied to her case. The justices, however, agreed to hear her appeal. (Landgraf vs. USI Film Products, 92-757).

In other actions, the court:

* Refused to get involved in a highly publicized Tennessee divorce dispute involving frozen embryos. In 1988, the embryos were conceived at an in-vitro fertilization clinic in Knoxville because Mary Sue Davis Stowe and her then-husband, Junior Lewis Davis, had been unable to have a child. But the couple later split up without an agreement on what was to become of the embryos.

Having remarried, Mrs. Stowe sought custody of the embryos, but her husband won a state court ruling blocking her. She appealed to the high court, contending that the embryos had a constitutional right to life, but the appeal was dismissed without comment. (Stowe vs. Davis, 92-910).

* Let stand a New Jersey ruling striking down that state’s laws protecting the purity of kosher foods on the grounds that they involved undue religious influence in state matters. Twenty states, including California, have consumer protection laws that set standards for what may be labeled kosher. But the New Jersey standard relied on the word of a committee of rabbis, a provision that the New Jersey Supreme Court said violated the Constitution’s separation of church and state. (National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs vs. Ran-Dav’s County Kosher, 92-1053).

* Agreed to decide whether the public schools must pay the cost if the parents of a disabled child decide to enroll her in a private school. A ruling on this issue, due next year, will affect school districts and parents nationwide. A 1975 federal law says handicapped and disabled students are entitled to a “free and appropriate” education at public expense, but it is not clear whether parents can be reimbursed if they turn down a public program in favor of a private one. (Florence County vs. Carter, 91-1523).