A group of black firefighter applicants in Chicago filed suit against the city and claimed it used an unlawful cut-off passing score for the pencil-and-paper civil service employment exam.
Applicants who scored below 64 were disqualified. Because so many applicants scored 89 or above, however the city set a second cut-off point. Applicants who scored below 89 but above 64 (passing scores) were told they probably wouldn’t be hired. As per the pattern, the majority of higher scorers were white. Blacks accounted for 11 percent.
The parties had a 300-day window to file complaints, but the plaintiffs waited 430 days. A federal judge ruled in favor of the applicants, but the appeals court overturned the ruling and held that the applicants waited too long to challenge the test results. The issue before the U.S. Supreme Court was whether the plaintiffs filed the claim in time to seek relief.
The city claimed the time to file suit began to accrue on Jan. 26, 1996. The plaintiffs claimed a new discriminatory act occurred each time scores were used between May 1996 and October 2001.
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiffs. (Source) The case goes back to the appeals court.
In a unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “It is not our task to assess the consequences of each approach and adopt the one that produces the least mischief. Our charge is to give effect to the law Congress enacted … Congress allowed claims to be brought against an employer who uses a practice that causes disparate impact, whatever the employer’s motive and whether or not he has employed the same practice in the past. If that effect was unintended, it is a problem for Congress, not one that federal courts can fix.”
It’s important to note that unlike Ricci v. DeStefano, the court ruled on a procedural issue, not a substantive one. The court ruled that the plaintiffs may go forward with their case, not that plaintiffs prevailed on the case’s merits.
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