Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1979

Personnel Administrator of Mass. v. Feeney

442 U.S. 256 | 99 S. Ct. 2282 | 60 L. Ed. 2d 870 | 1979 U.S. LEXIS 128

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Takeaway

In short, this case holds that a facially neutral law with a severe disparate impact on women violates equal protection only when the government acted because of that effect, not merely with awareness that the effect would occur.

Background

Massachusetts gave qualified veterans an absolute, lifetime preference in its classified civil service. Applicants took competitive examinations, but disabled veterans and veterans were ranked ahead of all nonveterans regardless of their respective scores. Because agencies selected from the top names on the resulting eligible lists, a passing veteran had a near-conclusive advantage over a higher-scoring nonveteran. The statute defined veterans in sex-neutral terms and permitted women veterans to claim the preference, but more than 98% of Massachusetts veterans were men.

Helen Feeney, a nonveteran woman with substantial civil-service experience, repeatedly earned high examination scores for better state positions. Yet male veterans with lower scores were ranked ahead of her, preventing her from reaching the certified lists from which appointments were made. She brought a § 1983 action alleging that the statute denied women equal protection.

A three-judge District Court found that the preference had a devastating effect on women's employment opportunities. Although it found the statute served legitimate purposes and was not enacted to discriminate against women, it held that the absolute preference's severe effect on women required the State to use a less exclusionary means of assisting veterans. The Supreme Court vacated and remanded for reconsideration under Washington v. Davis. On remand, the District Court again invalidated the statute, reasoning that the preference favored a class from which women had historically been excluded and that its consequences for women were too inevitable to be unintended. Massachusetts appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Massachusetts' absolute veterans' preference created an overt or covert gender classification subject to heightened equal-protection scrutiny.

Holding

No. The statute classified applicants by veteran status, not by sex, and it was not a pretext for preferring men over women.

Reasoning

The Equal Protection Clause does not forbid every law that distributes benefits and burdens unevenly. A law that expressly classifies by sex, or uses a facially neutral classification as a pretext for sex discrimination, requires an exceedingly persuasive justification. But a neutral law with unequal effects does not become a sex classification merely because women are disproportionately burdened.

The statute was facially gender neutral: it extended its preference to any qualified veteran, male or female. Massachusetts had consistently included women who served in official military units and, later, women who served in qualifying auxiliary units. Veteran status was therefore not a status uniquely reserved for men, even though relatively few women had been able to attain it.

The preference also disadvantaged many men because substantial numbers of men were nonveterans. Its effect could be explained directly by its legitimate purpose of favoring veterans for their service, easing their return to civilian life, and rewarding military sacrifice. Those purposes, rather than an effort to reserve public jobs for men, supplied the plausible and actual explanation for the statute's classification and impact.

Issue #2

Whether the statute's overwhelming adverse impact on women, together with the Legislature's foreseeable awareness of that impact, proved purposeful sex discrimination in violation of equal protection.

Holding

No. Disparate impact and foreseeable consequences did not establish that Massachusetts selected or retained the preference because of, rather than merely in spite of, its adverse effects on women.

Reasoning

Under Washington v. Davis and Arlington Heights, a facially neutral law violates equal protection only when discriminatory purpose is shown. Disparate impact is an important starting point in that inquiry, particularly when the affected group has historically suffered discrimination, but equal protection guarantees equal laws rather than equal results.

The Court acknowledged that Massachusetts deliberately adopted a veterans' preference and could not plausibly have been unaware that most veterans were men. But constitutional discriminatory purpose means more than voluntary action or awareness that a decision will predictably burden an identifiable group. It requires proof that the decisionmaker acted at least in part because it wanted that adverse effect.

The record did not show that Massachusetts enacted or repeatedly reaffirmed the preference to keep women in stereotyped or inferior civil-service roles. The original preference was adopted to assist older Civil War veterans, and later enactments extended the same benefit to veterans of later wars. Across that history, the State consistently described the favored class as veterans of either sex.

The severe effect on women could support an inference of discriminatory purpose in an appropriate case. Here, however, that effect was an unavoidable consequence of a policy the court had found legitimate, while the statutory history and available evidence affirmatively pointed to a genuine preference for veterans rather than an intent to disadvantage women. The statute might be unwise or unfair, but the Fourteenth Amendment does not invalidate ill-advised policy without proof of sex-based discrimination.

Concurrences

Justice Stevens

Reasoning

Justice Stevens agreed with the judgment and largely questioned whether the majority's two-step distinction between a covert gender classification and discriminatory purpose was analytically necessary. In his view, when a rule is not overtly sex based, asking whether it is covertly sex based effectively asks the same question as whether its adverse effects reflect invidious sex discrimination.

For Stevens, the decisive practical fact was that the statute disadvantaged approximately 1.867 million men as well as approximately 2.954 million women. The large number of adversely affected men, relatively close to the number of adversely affected women, refuted the claim that Massachusetts intended to benefit men as a class over women as a class.

Dissents

Justice Marshall

Reasoning

Justice Marshall concluded that Massachusetts' choice of an absolute veterans' preference demonstrated purposeful sex discrimination. A legislature may pursue multiple objectives at once, so a finding that the statute aimed to benefit veterans did not logically exclude a simultaneous purpose to disadvantage women. Under Arlington Heights, an illicit purpose need only be a motivating factor, not the sole or primary cause of a law.

In Marshall's view, the statute's effect on women was so predictable and extreme that discriminatory intent should be inferred. Fewer than 2% of Massachusetts women were veterans, and the absolute preference effectively made desirable civil-service jobs almost exclusively male. The State built its employment preference upon veteran status even though federal military policies had severely restricted women's opportunity to acquire that status.

The historical operation of the scheme reinforced that inference. For decades, Massachusetts exempted jobs specially calling for women from the preference. In practice, that arrangement left women concentrated in traditionally female, lower-grade clerical positions while veterans, overwhelmingly male, received access to more responsible and better-paid work. That history reflected and perpetuated archaic assumptions about women's proper occupational roles.

Because the scheme was sex discriminatory, Marshall would have applied intermediate scrutiny and held it unconstitutional. Assisting veterans' transition to civilian life did not justify a permanent preference repeatedly available long after discharge; encouraging enlistment was poorly served by retroactive benefits given to draftees as well as volunteers; and rewarding service did not justify the statute's sweeping exclusion of women. Point preferences, time-limited preferences, and other veterans' benefits could advance the Commonwealth's goals with far less discrimination against women.