Featured Case

City's fire department promotion plan ignites discrimination claims

Ricci v. DeStefano

Contact: Steven G. Gieseler

Status: Victory. The US Supreme Court reversed the courts holding that the City's action in discarding the promotion tests violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act

Summary: In 2003, the City of New Haven, Connecticut, sought to fill captain and lieutenant vacancies in its fire department. The City conducted job-related examinations consistent with its merit-selection rules. Notwithstanding the job-related nature of the examinations and the City’s compliance with merit-selection rules, the City abandoned the promotion list and refused to promote anyone on the list because too few minority candidates did well enough on the exam to qualify for promotion. The City conceded that it had no evidence that the exams were invalid. Nevertheless, fearing that using the test results would expose it to liability under a “disparate impact” theory of discrimination, the City cancelled the promotional process. New Haven’s decision brings into sharp focus how allowing racial disparities alone to provide the basis for a claim of unlawful discrimination lead to the type of race-based decision making that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was originally intended to eradicate.

Plaintiffs, seventeen white and one Hispanic firefighter, brought suit alleging that New Haven discriminated intentionally against them by using race as a basis for cancelling the valid promotional process in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VII. Under Title VII, it is unlawful for an employer to “discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court’s dismissal of plaintiffs’ complaint on grounds that, as a matter of law, the City’s desire to avoid a potential lawsuit was a legitimate nondiscriminatory motivation for cancelling the promotional exam. However, the threat of a “disparate impact” lawsuit has never been justification for overtly discriminatory hiring or promotional decisions such as ignoring test results because the racial composition of those results was unbalanced.

The United States Supreme Court accepted this case for review on the issue of whether municipalities may decline to certify results on an exam that would make disproportionately more white applicants eligible for promotion than minority applicants, due to fears that certifying the results would lead to charges of racial discrimination.

This case is virtually identical to the case of Oakley v. City of Memphis, in which PLF submitted a brief amicus curiae in support of petition for writ of certiorari.