Title IX rights expanded
The Supreme Court, splitting 5-4, on Tuesday significantly expanded the scope of protection against sex-based discrimination under Title IX of federal civil rights law.
The Court ruled that a teacher who is disciplined after complaining about sex discrimination against students has a legal right to bring a retaliation claim under Title IX. (Marty Lederman, in a post below, provides links to the majority and dissenting opinions in Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education, docket 02-1672.)
Overturning the Eleventh Circuit, the Court said that such a teacher has a private right to bring a lawsuit after complaining of sex bias — not against the teacher, but against the students — where the school system’s retaliation against the teacher was “an intentional response to the nature of the complaint” — that is, sex discrimination.
Title IX, the Court said in the opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, does not require that the victim of the retaliation also be the victim of the discrimination that the teacher had targeted.
“Teachers and coaches…are often in the best position to vindicate the rights of their students because they are better able to identify discrimination and bring it to the attention of administrators,” the Court majority said. “Indeed, sometimes adult employees are the only effective adversaries of discrimination in schools.”
The O’C, Where All the Laws Are Good Looking
Justice O’Connor has broken bad again, this time siding with the liberal foursome to achieve good results in Jackson v. Birmingham Bd. of Ed. O’Connor’s opinion holds that Title IX’s implied private right of action for discrimination “on the basis of…
Comment by Ex Post — March 29, 2005 @ 4:45 pm
Not to pick nits with the headline of the post, but the central point of the majority opinion is that its holding is not an “expansion” but an affirmation of the scope of Title IX. It is the dissent that contends that allowing claims for employer retribution unfairly “expands” Title IX in a way that states accepting funds did not expect and that Congress did not clearly demand.
Comment by Brian Galle — March 30, 2005 @ 1:14 pm