Court Shields States in Suits on Age Bias

The Supreme Court on Tuesday stripped the nation’s 5 million state workers--as well as California’s teachers and public school employees--of federal protection against age discrimination.

On a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that state agencies, including public colleges, are shielded from lawsuits filed by their workers under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

The decision throws out claims of age bias in three lawsuits: one from professors and librarians at Florida State University, a second from a Florida prison guard and a third from two instructors at an Alabama state college.

Once again, the court’s conservative majority showed itself determined to limit the power of the national government and to champion the states as independent sovereigns.

“Congress exceeded its authority,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, when in 1974 it gave state workers the same rights as private sector employees to sue for damages if they are victims of age discrimination. States, she said, have a “sovereign immunity” that shields them from such private lawsuits.

In California, public school districts are treated as state agencies and, therefore, will have the same legal immunity from age bias suits.

“This is a terrible decision,” said Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel for the National Education Assn., which represented the Florida professors. “It turns the clock back on civil rights and makes state workers into second-class citizens.”

Still, because California and other states have strong laws against job discrimination, some experts predicted that the effect on their teachers and others workers may be minimal.

“California is out ahead of the states and the federal government on the protection of employees’ rights,” said Los Angeles lawyer Arthur F. Silbergeld.

But not all states extend such protections, said Laurie McCann, an AARP lawyer. “If you are in California, you are probably in good shape. If you are a state trooper in Alabama, you are not.”

Unquestionably, the driving theme of the court under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has become states’ rights. In three rulings last June, the court shielded states from having to pay overtime to their workers and blocked claims against state agencies for infringing patents and trademarks.

Tuesday’s opinion marked the first time the Rehnquist majority has directly limited Congress’ power to remedy discrimination.

Also vulnerable now are the federal laws that protect state workers with disabilities and mandate a period of leave for workers with a medical or family crisis. Even Title IX, the landmark federal law that requires equal funding for women’s sports, could be challenged as exceeding Congress’ power, some experts said.

From the nation’s beginning, the balance of power between the states and the national government has been a recurring dispute.

Until the 1930s, Washington’s power was seen as under strict limits. For example, areas such as crime, education and private business were thought to be off-limits to federal authorities. Even when notorious criminals were on the loose, the FBI shied away until the suspects had crossed state lines.

But the New Deal era greatly expanded the reach of federal control over the economy. In recent decades, federal authority has spread to all aspects of American life, such as regulating the workplace, the schools and the environment.

Rehnquist, joined by the four other conservative justices, has consciously tried to move the law back to an earlier era.

Legal scholars differ on whether the recent rulings of the Rehnquist court are a necessary corrective or a reactionary retrenchment.

Pepperdine University law professor Douglas W. Kmiec defends the court for trying to preserve the balance set in the original Constitution.

“These decisions are healthy for the democratic process. They reflect a trust in local governments and states to resolve their own problems in their own ways,” said Kmiec, a former Reagan administration attorney. “Where is it written [that] these questions have to be elevated to the federal level?”

USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a sharp critic of the trend, responded by saying that civil rights is a national issue, not a local one.

“I thought it had been accepted over the last 40 years that the federal government has a special role in stopping discrimination,” he said. “This decision marks the first time they have limited the ability to sue states for discrimination.”

Lawyers for the Florida and Alabama professors argued that the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce the age-discrimination law against the states. Added after the Civil War, the amendment says that states may not deny persons the “equal protection of the laws.” Its last section says that Congress “shall have the power to enforce by appropriate legislation” this mandate of equality.

But the Supreme Court concluded Tuesday that an attack on age discrimination is not appropriate. “States may discriminate on the basis of age,” O’Connor said, unlike race and gender discrimination, which are forbidden.

Her opinion (Kimel vs. Florida, 98-791) was joined by Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. The four dissenters lambasted the majority for “judicial activism” of the right.

In a remarkable rebuke to the majority, Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer vowed that they would never go along with the conservatives’ doctrine announcing that states have a “sovereign immunity” from federal laws.

“This kind of judicial activism . . . represents such a radical departure of the proper role of this court that it should be opposed whenever the opportunity arises,” wrote Stevens for the dissenters.

The Rehnquist majority says that the doctrine of “state sovereign immunity” comes from the 11th Amendment, which says that the power of federal courts “shall not be construed to extend to any [law]suit commenced against one of the United States by a citizen of another state.”

But Stevens said the plain words of the 11th Amendment show that it has nothing to do with this case. Professor J. Daniel Kimel, the lead plaintiff, is suing his own state of Florida, not another state.

The victory for the states was announced in the courtroom moments before oral arguments began in a major case that pits women’s rights against states’ rights.

Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 in response to complaints that cases of date rape and spousal abuse often went unprosecuted by the states. The new law said that women have a right to be free of “gender-motivated violence” and it gave victims of sexual assaults a right to sue their assailants in federal court.

A test case soon arose when a Virginia Tech freshman, Christy Brzonkala, said that she was raped in a dormitory room by Antonio Morrison, a star linebacker. When the university reinstated Morrison to play football, despite her complaint, she sued him.

But before her claim could be heard, a conservative U.S. appeals court struck down the law as unconstitutional.

All eyes were on Justice O’Connor during the oral argument, since she is assumed to hold the deciding vote. A former Arizona state legislator and appointee of President Reagan, she has joined the five-member majority that champions states’ rights.

In cases involving women’s rights, however, she has often switched sides and helped form a liberal majority. In June, for example, she cast the deciding fifth vote to rule that schools and colleges can be sued if their officials ignore reports of a student being sexually harassed by another student.

In her only comments Tuesday, O’Connor sounded troubled by the reach of the Violence Against Women Act.

If federal lawmakers are free to intervene whenever they detect gender bias, “presumably Congress could intervene with a federal law on alimony and child custody,” she commented. But a lawyer for the NOW Legal Defense Fund, representing Brzonkala, pointed out that most state officials welcomed the women’s right law, not seeing it as a threat or intrusion.

Attorneys general from 36 states, including California’s Bill Lockyer, filed a brief urging the court to uphold the law.

Only the state of Alabama asked the justices to strike down the law on states’ rights grounds.

A ruling in the case (Brzonkala vs. Morrison, 99-29) can be expected in several months.