{"id":9748,"date":"2026-01-27T15:12:40","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T15:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-appears-poised-to-lower-bar-for-reverse-discrimination-claims\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T15:12:40","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T15:12:40","slug":"supreme-court-appears-poised-to-lower-bar-for-reverse-discrimination-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-appears-poised-to-lower-bar-for-reverse-discrimination-claims\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Appears Poised to Lower Bar for \u201cReverse Discrimination\u201d Claims"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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June 6, 2025 Update.<\/strong> As expected, on June 5, 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a plaintiff in a Title VII discrimination case \u201cwho is a member of a majority group\u201d need not show additional \u201cbackground circumstances\u201d to support their claim, beyond what any other plaintiff must show. Justice Jackson, who authored the Court\u2019s opinion, wrote that such an \u201cadditional \u2018background circumstances\u2019 requirement is not consistent with Title VII\u2019s text or our case law construing the statute,\u201d as \u201cTitle VII does not impose such a heightened evidentiary standard on majority-group plaintiffs.\u201d Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, wrote a concurring opinion \u201cto highlight the problems that arise when judges create atextual legal rules and frameworks.\u201d Notably, the concurring Justices indicated that they viewed the Court\u2019s 1973 decision in McDonnell Douglas Corp.<\/em>\u2014which sets out a commonly-used framework for evaluating the evidence in a Title VII discrimination case\u2014to be another such rule that \u201clacks any basis in the text of Title VII and has proved difficult for courts to apply.\u201d<\/p>\n

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On February 26, 2025, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Ames<\/em> v. Ohio Department of Youth Services<\/em>, to address the question of whether a majority-group plaintiff must show additional \u201cbackground circumstances\u201d to support a discrimination claim under Title VII, beyond what a minority-group plaintiff must show. Based on the questioning at oral argument, it appears that a majority of the Justices agree with Ames that Title VII protects all workers equally and the same standards should apply to all Title VII plaintiffs.<\/p>\n

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Plaintiff Marlean Ames filed a lawsuit against her employer, the Ohio Department of Youth Services (the \u201cDepartment\u201d), alleging that it violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after she was not selected for a promotion, and was subsequently demoted. Ames, who is heterosexual, alleged that these decisions were the result of discrimination based, among other things, on her sexual orientation, citing the fact that her supervisor is gay; that she was replaced in her original role with a gay employee; and that the promotion she had applied for was later filled with a gay employee. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the Department.<\/p>\n

On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed<\/a> the district court grant of summary judgment, on the grounds that because \u201cAmes is heterosexual\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0she must make a showing in addition to the usual ones for establishing a prima-facie case. Specifically, Ames must show \u2018background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority,\u2019\u201d which is a standard that some federal circuit courts of appeal hold majority-group plaintiffs to in reverse discrimination cases.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court heard oral argument<\/a> in the case on February 26, 2025, and many of the Justices appeared to agree with Ames that the same standards for stating a Title VII claim should apply to all plaintiffs. Justice Kavanaugh, for example, asked, \u201cSo\u00a0. .\u00a0.\u00a0all you want for this case is a really short opinion that says discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, whether it\u2019s because you\u2019re gay or because you\u2019re straight, is prohibited, and the rules are the same whichever way that goes?\u00a0.\u00a0. .\u00a0.\u00a0That\u2019s all we need to say, right?\u201d Justice Barrett asked a question confirming that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has rejected the \u201cbackground circumstances\u201d rule. Justice Alito asked whether \u201cthe rule that the Sixth Circuit applied\u201d was based on an interpretation of Supreme Court precedent that, he suggested, may be \u201cno longer sound today.\u201d In another line of questioning directed at the Department, Justices Kagan and Kavanaugh elicited an answer from counsel for the Department that \u201cthe idea that you hold people to different standards because of their protected characteristics is wrong.\u201d As Justice Kagan noted to the Department\u2019s counsel, \u201cThe question presented is whether a majority-group plaintiff has to show something more than a minority-group plaintiff, here, whether a straight person has to show more than a gay person. Everybody over here says no. You say no too. That was the question that we took the case to decide.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 6, 2025 Update. As expected, on June 5, 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a plaintiff in a Title VII discrimination case \u201cwho is a member […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[534,1178,300,143,349,3115,5871,533],"class_list":["post-9748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-appears","tag-bar","tag-claims","tag-court","tag-discrimination","tag-poised","tag-reverse","tag-supreme"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}