That’s wrong.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court voted 5-to-4 to enforce the 180-day statute of limitations in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. In doing so, it dismissed an untimely pay discrimination claim by Lilly Ledbetter against Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. under Title VII, suggesting that she should have brought her suit instead under the Equal Pay Act, which has a longer statute of limitations. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in dissent, suggested that the five justices in the majority (who happened to be male) were “indifferent” to the “way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

Greenhouse suggests that the close 5-to-4 ruling would have been decided the other way if Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a woman, were still on the court, and had not been replaced by a man, Justice Samuel Alito. Justice O’Connor, she said, “would almost certainly have voted the other way, bringing the opposite outcome.”

But Justice O’Connor rigorously enforced statutes of limitations, and she wasn’t the swing-vote on the Supreme Court in statute of limitations cases. A man, Justice Clarence Thomas, was, perhaps reflecting the influence on him of his experience as EEOC Chairman (the EEOC has long sought to limit the application of Title VII’s statute of limitations).

In a 2002 case, Justice Thomas joined the court’s four liberal justices in weakening the statute of limitations in discriminatory harassment cases in National R.R. Passenger Corp. v. Morgan. It was Justice O’Connor who wrote the dissent against that ruling, which was also decided by a 5-to-4 margin.

The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal argues that Greenhouse’s story on the Ledbetter decision was little more than an editorial in favor of the dissent.

That would be unfortunate, because the New York Times is a very influential newspaper, given its large national circulation.

(Indeed, Greenhouse herself is said to be quite influential: the phrase “the Greenhouse Effect” was coined by senior federal judge Laurence Silberman to describe the phenomenon of once-conservative Supreme Court justices writing liberal decisions in order to get favorable coverage from Greenhouse and the Times).

I explained yesterday at the Openmarket.org blog why the Supreme Court was right to enforce the law’s statute of limitations in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, and why the decision does not gut legal protections against discrimination.

(By the way, the Ledbetter decision does not change the ability to bring pay discrimination lawsuits based on race and gender under the Equal Pay Act (which bans sex-based pay discrimination) and 42 USC 1981 (which bans race-based pay discrimination), statutes which have longer statutes of limitations than Title VII. Thus, it is silly to argue that this decision guts protections against discrimination).

The Point of Law blog also contains a link to my explanation.