Trial News

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a woman’s employment discrimination claim can move forward even though she had not exhausted her administrative remedies before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) or its state agency equivalent as required under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Court affirmed the Fifth Circuit, which had held that the administrative exhaustion requirement is procedural, not jurisdictional, and may be waived if the defendant does not timely raise it. (Fort Bend Cnty. v. Davis, 2019 WL 2331306 (U.S. June 3, 2019).)

Lois Davis was an information technology (IT) supervisor for Fort Bend County, Texas. In 2010, she filed a complaint with the county’s human resources department alleging the IT director, Charles Cook, had been sexually harassing her for more than two years. Fort Bend found that Davis’s allegations were substantiated and fired Cook. Davis alleges that after Cook’s dismissal, her supervisor, Kenneth Ford, retaliated: He demoted her, reprimanded her for errors she did not make, improperly docked her pay, and required her to perform different tasks than similarly situated employees. In 2011, Davis filed a complaint with the Texas Workforce Commission Civil Rights Division and the EEOC alleging gender discrimination and retaliation for her earlier sexual harassment complaint.

After Davis filed her complaint, Ford asked her to work over a weekend to assist with a move. Davis informed Ford that she was unavailable to work on Sunday morning due to a church event. After failing to report to work that Sunday morning, Davis was fired. She subsequently amended her Texas Workforce Commission intake questionnaire to include religion but did not amend her charge.

After the Texas Workforce Commission issued a right-to-sue letter, Davis filed claims against Fort Bend in Texas federal district court alleging retaliation and religious discrimination under Title VII. The court granted summary judgment to the county and dismissed Davis’s claims. The Fifth Circuit reversed as to the dismissal of Davis’s religious discrimination claim, finding that “genuine disputes of material fact existed as to whether . . . Davis held a bona fide religious belief that she needed to attend the Sunday service; and . . . Fort Bend would have suffered an undue hardship in accommodating Davis’s religious observation.”

On remand, for the first time, Fort Bend asserted that Davis had “failed to exhaust her administrative remedies on her religious discrimination claim.” The district court disagreed with Davis that Fort Bend had waived this defense by waiting so long to raise it and dismissed Davis’s religious discrimination claim. Davis appealed again, arguing that “failure to exhaust administrative remedies under Title VII is not a jurisdictional bar to suit.”

The Fifth Circuit noted that there is disagreement within the circuit on whether the “administrative exhaustion requirement is a jurisdictional requirement that implicates subject matter jurisdiction or merely a prerequisite to suit.” Citing a 2006 Supreme Court decision, the Fifth Circuit concluded that “when Congress does not rank a statutory limitation on coverage as jurisdictional, courts should treat the restriction as nonjurisdictional in character.” (Arbaugh v. Y&H Corp., 546 U.S. 500, 515-516 (2006).) As Congress had included no such limitation in Title VII’s administrative exhaustion requirement, the court concluded the requirement is nonjurisdictional and reversed. The Supreme Court granted Fort Bend’s petition for certiorari to consider whether Title VII’s administrative exhaustion requirement is jurisdictional and can be raised at any stage of a proceeding or is procedural and forfeited if not timely raised.

The Court agreed with the Fifth Circuit and held that the administrative exhaustion requirement is “a processing rule, albeit a mandatory one, not a jurisdictional prescription delineating the adjudicatory authority of courts.” The Court rejected Fort Bend’s argument that Title VII follows other statutory schemes when claims are channeled first to agency adjudication and then to judicial review. A prescription is not jurisdictional just because it promotes Congress’s objectives, and a procedural “rule may be mandatory without being jurisdictional,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She added that complainants like Davis have no incentive to skirt Title VII’s procedural charge-filing requirements and that it would be “foolhardy consciously to take the risk that an employer would forgo a potentially dispositive defense.”

Law professor Pamela Karlan, who represented Davis through Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, noted that “the Court’s decision will prevent defendant employers that do not properly raise any exhaustion defense in a timely manner from later foreclosing a plaintiff from getting the merits of the Title VII claim adjudicated.” The decision is narrow, however, and Karlan added that “the only victims of employment discrimination for whom the decision is relevant are those who arguably failed to exhaust with the EEOC and sue defendants that don’t raise the failure to exhaust in a timely fashion. The case has little if any bearing on the claims of discrimination victims who properly present their claims to the EEOC or the claims of discrimination victims who don’t properly exhaust if the defendant raises that failure in a timely way.”