Tag: discrimination

law, employment law, discrimination, free sppech, COVID 19, eviction moratorium, religious freedom, landlord tenant

Statement of Justice Gorsuch

Arizona, et al v. Mayorkas, 589 U.S. _____ (2023)

Statement of GORSUCH, J.

This case concerns the “Title 42 orders.” Those emergency decrees severely restricted immigration to this country for the ostensible purpose of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The federal government began issuing the orders in March 2020 and continued issuing them until April 2022, when officials decided they were no longer necessary.1 If that seems reasonable enough, events soon took a turn.

In a federal district court in Louisiana, a number of States argued that the government’s decision to end the Title 42 orders violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U. S. C. §551 et seq., because agency officials had not pro­ vided advance notice of their decision or invited public com­ ment.2 The States did not seriously dispute that the public- health justification for the orders had lapsed. The States also understood that their lawsuit would only require the government to take certain additional procedural steps before ending the Title 42 orders. But the States apparently calculated that even a short, court-ordered extension of those decrees was worth the fight. Worth it because, in their judgment, a new and different crisis had emerged at the border and the federal government had done too little to address it.3 Keeping the Title 42 orders in place even temporarily was better than the alternative. In the end, the district court agreed with the States’ APA arguments and entered a nationwide injunction that effectively required the government to enforce the Title 42 orders until and un­ less it complied with the statute’s notice-and-comment procedures.4

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, a group of asylum seekers filed a competing class-action lawsuit in a federal district court in Washington, D. C. This group argued that, from the start, the government lacked legal authority to issue its Title 42 orders. Ultimately, the D. C. district court agreed with the group’s assessment and issued an equally sweeping form of relief — sometimes called “universal vacatur” — that purported to wipe the Title 42 orders off the books as if they never existed.5 So it is that the federal government found itself in an unenviable spot — bound by two inconsistent nationwide commands, one requiring it to enforce the Title 42 orders and another practically forbidding it from doing so.

If these head-spinning developments were not enough, more followed. Displeased with the D. C. district court’s ruling, some of the States in the Louisiana case moved to intervene in the D. C. case. The States said they wanted to defend the Title 42 orders on appeal because the federal government was unlikely to do so with sufficient vigor. Ultimately, the court of appeals denied the States’ motion to intervene as untimely.6 So, late in 2022, the States turned to this Court seeking two things. First, they asked for expedited review of the appellate court’s order denying their motion to intervene. Second, they asked for a stay of the D. C. district court’s decree vacating the Title 42 orders. The Court granted both requests. In doing so, the Court effectively extended the Title 42 orders indefinitely.7

Now, almost five months later, the Court puts a final twist on the tale. It vacates the appellate court’s order denying the States’ motion to intervene and remands with instructions to dismiss the motion as moot. Why the sudden about-face? Recently, Congress passed and the President signed into law a joint resolution declaring that the COVID-19 emergency is over.8 The Secretary of Health and Human Services, too, has issued his own directive announcing the end of the public-health emergency underlying the Title 42 orders.9 Apparently, these developments are enough to persuade the Court that the Title 42 orders the government wished to withdraw a year ago are now as good as gone and any dispute over them is moot.

I recite all this tortured procedural history not because I think the Court’s decision today is wrong. Nearly five months ago, I argued that the Court erred when it granted expedited review and issued a stay. As I explained at the time, I do not discount the States’ concerns about what is happening at the border, but “the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis.”10 And the Court took a serious misstep when it effectively allowed nonparties to this case to manipulate our docket to prolong an emergency decree designed for one crisis in order to address an entirely different one.11 Today’s dismissal goes some way to correcting that error.

I lay out the history of this case only because it is so typical. Not just as an illustration of the quandaries that can follow when district courts award nationwide relief, a problem I have written about before.12 Even more importantly, the history of this case illustrates the disruption we have experienced over the last three years in how our laws are made and our freedoms observed.

Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emer­gency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.13 They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private.14 They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.15 They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too.16 They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct.17 They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.18

Federal executive officials entered the act too. Not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide.19 They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.20 They threatened to fire noncompliant employees,21 and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement.22 Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.23

While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress — the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws — too often fell silent. Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few-but hardly all-of the intrusions upon them. In some cases, like this one, courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking­by-litigation.

Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action — almost any action — as long as someone does some­thing to address a perceived threat. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties — the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes. We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.24

But maybe we have learned another lesson too. The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government. However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process.25 Decisions produced by those who indulge no criticism are rarely as good as those produced after robust and uncensored debate.26 Decisions announced on the fly are rarely as wise as those that come after careful deliberation. Decisions made by a few often yield unintended consequences that may be avoided when more are consulted. Autocracies have always suffered these defects. Maybe, hope­ fully, we have relearned these lessons too.

In the 1970s, Congress studied the use of emergency decrees.27 It observed that they can allow executive authorities to tap into extraordinary powers.28 Congress also observed that emergency decrees have a habit of long outliving the crises that generate them; some federal emergency proclamations, Congress noted, had remained in effect for years or decades after the emergency in question had passed.29

At the same time, Congress recognized that quick unilateral executive action is sometimes necessary and permitted in our constitutional order.30 In an effort to balance these considerations and ensure a more normal operation of our laws and a firmer protection of our liberties, Congress adopted a number of new guardrails in the National Emergencies Act.31

Despite that law, the number of declared emergencies has only grown in the ensuing years.32 And it is hard not to wonder whether, after nearly a half century and in light of our Nation’s recent experience, another look is warranted. It is hard not to wonder, too, whether state legislatures might profitably reexamine the proper scope of emergency executive powers at the state level. At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another. Make no mistake-decisive executive action is sometimes necessary and appropriate. But if emergency decrees promise to solve some problems, they threaten to generate others. And rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.

Footnotes

1 87 Fed. Reg. 19944-19946, 19956 (2022).

2 Louisiana v. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 603 F. Supp. 3d 406, 412 (WD La. 2022).

3 Id., at 417.

4 Id., at 441.

5 Huisha-Huisha v. Mayorkas, 2022 WL 16948610, *15 (Nov. 15, 2022).

6 Arizona v. Mayorkas, 598 U. S. _ , _ (2022) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 2).

7 See id., at_   (slip op., at 3).

8 Pub. L. 118-3, 137 Stat. 6.

9 See U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE), https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/covid-19- public-health-emergency/index.html.

10 Arizona, 598 U. S., at_  (GORSUCH, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 3).

11 Id., at_-_ (slip op., at 2-3).

12 Department of Homeland Security v. New York, 589 U. S. _, _ (2020) (opinion concurring in grant of stay) (slip op., at 3).

13 See, e.g., Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, 589 U. S. _, _ (2020) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 2) (noting that the Governor of Wisconsin ordered residents “to stay at home … to slow the spread of the disease”); see generally The Council of State Governments, COVID-19 Resources for State Leaders: 2020- 2021 Executive Orders, https://web.csg.org/covidl9/executive-orders/ (COVID-19 Resources for State Leaders) (cataloging such orders issued throughout the country).

14 See, e.g., Rossi v. Arch Ins. Co., 60 F. 4th 1189, 1192 (CA8 2023) (not­ing that “state and local governments” across the country issued “stay­at-home orders” that shuttered businesses); Kentucky ex rel. Danville Christian Academy, Inc. v. Beshear, 981 F. 3d 505, 507 (CA6 2020) (noting that the Governor of Kentucky prohibited “in-person instruction at all public and private elementary and secondary schools”); see generally COVID-19 Resources for State Leaders.

15 Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak, 591 U. S. _,  _  (2020) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting from denial of application for injunctive relief) (slip op., at 1).

16 See, e.g., D. Burke, Police Arrest Florida Pastor for Holding Church

Services Despite Stay-at-Home Order, CNN (Mar. 30, 2020), https:// http://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/us/florida-pastor-arrested-river-church/index.html.

17 Roberts v. Neace, 958 F. 3d 409, 412 (CA6 2020) (per curiam).

18 Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, 592 U. S. _,  _  (2020) (per curiam) (slip op., at 1-7); see also South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, 592 U.S._,_-_ (2021) (statement of GORSUCH, J.) (slip op., at 1-6).

19 Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Servs., 594 U. S. _,  _  (2021) (per curiam) (slip op., at 1).

20 National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA, 595 U. S. _,_  (2022) (slip op., at 1).

21 See, e.g., K. Liptak & K. Collins, Biden Announces New Vaccine Mandates that Could Cover 100 Million Americans, CNN (Sept. 9, 2021), https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/09/politics/joe-biden-covid-speech/index.html.   22Austin v. U.S. Navy Seals 1-26, 595 U.S._,_ (2022) (ALITO, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 1).

23 See, e.g., S. Myers, Free Speech vs. Disinformation Comes to a Head, N. Y. Times (Feb. 9, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/business/ free-speech-social-media-lawsuit.html.

24 See, e.g., Aristotle’s Politics, Bk. V, chs. 2, 4 (H. Rackham transl. 1959).

25 See, e.g., The Federalist No. 10, pp. 80-84 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (J. Madison); id., No. 35, at 215-216 (A. Hamilton); id., No. 57, at 350- 356 (J. Madison).

26 Cf. Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring).

27 Congressional Research Service, National Emergency Powers 7 (Nov. 19, 2021) (CRS) (describing congressional studies undertaken from 1972 to 1976 regarding emergency powers).

28 Id., at 8.

29 Id., at 7.

30 Id., at 1, 8-10.

31 90 Stat. 1255 (codified at 50 U.S. C. §§1601-1651).

32 CRS 12 (identifying dozens of existing emergencies as of 2019).

fair housing, housing court, landlord tenant, law

Masscourts.org: A tool to use with caution

April 28, 2023:-  As part of the applicant screening process, landlords are able to look at masscourts.org, a site that enables the public to search for civil lawsuits. There they can find out whether rental applicants have been involved in any court proceedings, including summary process (eviction) cases and cases where tenants have sued their landlords.

If an applicant has been the defendant in several eviction cases for nonpayment of rent, the landlord may worry that the person may not be a reliable tenant. May the landlord safely reject the applicant for that reason alone? 

I would counsel caution. Although I have not seen any Housing Court rulings on this topic, let alone any appellate-level decisions, I think that rejecting an applicant on the basis of having been the defendant in a summary-process case could be unlawful. Why? Because it might constitute reprisal.

Sword and shield

Reprisals against tenants are unlawful. The relevant Massachusetts statute, G.L. c. 186, § 18, prohibits “any person or agent thereof” from taking reprisals against tenants because of the tenants reporting or complaining about suspected violations or because of the tenants trying to enforce any law, regulation, or bylaw that regulates residential premises. For example, if the conditions in a dwelling fall below what the State Sanitary Code requires and the tenants complain to the board of health, any act of reprisal against the tenants will give the tenants the right to sue for damages.

The rationale is clear. If landlords can evict tenants who complain about sub-standard conditions, tenants will be more likely to put up with bad conditions out of fear of losing the house or apartment. This would cause quality of rental housing to deteriorate. The law’s goal is to protect tenants who complain and thereby encourage landlords to respond to complaints by repairing the bad conditions so that the quality of rental housing to improve.

This law usually comes up when a landlord has taken tenants to court for nonpayment of rent.

If a landlord starts a nonpayment case, the tenants will have a defense if they can show that the reason they were not paying rent was the bad conditions in the dwelling. This defense does not appear in c. 186, § 18, by the way, but in a different statute, namely G.L. c. 239, § 2A. Again, the rationale for this law is obvious: It encourages landlords to respond promptly to conditions complaints so that the tenants will resume paying rent. In the context of a nonpayment eviction, therefore, the law against reprisal operates as a shield.

But reprisal can also serve as a sword, enabling the tenants to go on offense and sue, even if nobody is trying to evict them.

Is it only the tenants’ current landlord who is vulnerable to a lawsuit for reprisal?

No, at least not if my reading of the statute is correct. By prohibiting “any person” from taking reprisals, section 18 encompasses not only the landlord who tries to evict the tenants but also anyone else who retaliates against the tenants, including (arguably) a person who decides not to rent to them because of their exercising those legally-protected rights vis-à-vis their previous landlord.

Let’s say I’m a landlord with a vacant unit and a couple responds to my advertisement by submitting an application. They have great credit and the ability to pay the rent. Before I invite them to a viewing, I check out masscourts.org and learn that one of their previous landlords filed an eviction case against them for nonpayment of rent. So I decline to take their application any further and wish them well with their housing search.

But if the applicants had been withholding rent because of bad conditions (as the law permits them to do) and their landlord — instead of bringing the place up to Code — tried to evict them anyway, I will be depriving this couple of housing solely because they exercised a legally-protected right. In rejecting their application, I am retaliating against them just as surely as their landlord did. If the couple figure out my reason for rejecting their application, could they sue me for reprisal?

I am not a landlord and this is a hypothetical situation. But it is not one that I would like any of my landlord clients to confront in real life.

What to do

Landlords can use information about previous civil cases without engaging in reprisals. Think about the Criminal Offender Registration (CORI) database, for example.  

Some landlords ask applicants to authorize them to run CORI checks as the last step in the application process. The regulations that govern CORI checks (803 CMR 500) allow landlords to do that, so long as they abide by some basic, sensible rules. If the CORI check produces a result, the landlord has to let the applicant know and provide an opportunity to dispute it. A landlord is not allowed to assume that the CORI result is accurate and reject the application for that reason.

This seems like a practical model for how landlords should to treat civil cases. If a landlord learns that the applicants were defendants in a nonpayment case, the landlord could review the court filings. What did the applicants file in response to the previous landlord’s complaint for nonpayment? If the tenants did not file an answer with counterclaims, it might seem reasonable to believe, for the time being, that the tenants had not been withholding rent because of bad conditions. Think of that as a working assumption, and nothing more.

The landlord should still ask the applicants for their side of the story. Perhaps the case settled even before the applicants needed to file an answer, because the Housing Court Specialist examined the Health Inspector’s report (yes, the applicants had called the board of health, which you would not necessarily know just by looking at the list of court filings) and explained how the judge would probably rule. At that point, the plaintiff landlord agreed to waive the arrears and dismiss the nonpayment case, and the tenants agreed to move out and move on.

On the other hand, perhaps the applicants were elective nonpayers, the polite term for tenants who choose not to pay rent and opt instead to game the system by forcing the landlord to file an eviction case, drag out the proceedings as long as they can, then — with the landlord having reached the end of a very long tether — agree to leave so long as the landlord pays them off. Such cases are real, and not as rare as one would wish.

But it would be a mistake to presume that all summary-process defendants are elective nonpayers until proven otherwise. Merely seeing that applicants have been defendants in a summary-process case tells you nothing about why. A presumption of guilt is not only unfair, but also legally hazardous as a potential act of reprisal, in my opinion.

Conclusion

Landlords are free to use masscourts.org as one tool in the applicant-screening toolkit but should bear in mind the risk of being sued for unlawful reprisal. If applicants show up in the court records, landlords should not treat the fact as conclusive evidence that the applicants would be bad tenants and automatically reject the application. Instead, landlords should find out more about the case, both from the court filings and from the applicants.

law, employment law, discrimination, supreme court of the united states, religious freedom

New video about SCOTUS decision

March 31, 2023:- Attorney Patrick Daubert and I both represent people who held fast to their religious principles rather than bow to the vaccine mandate. In this new video, we discuss the Supreme Court taking another look at the meaning of “undue hardship” in religious-discrimination cases.

At present, if employees demonstrate a sincerely held religious belief that prevent them from getting injected with a particular pharmaceutical product, the employer can get out of accommodating those beliefs if doing so would cause a hardship that is more than a de minimis.

The more-than-de-minimis rule is something that the Supreme Court came up with many years ago when applying Title VII; what Title VII itself says is “undue hardship,” not “any trifling inconvenience.” Attorney Daubert and I consider the implications of the Supreme Court construing the term “undue hardship” in the way Congress intended when it enacted the law.

COVID 19, discrimination, employment law, law, religious freedom

More than 300 deaths among “fully vaccinated” in 69 days

December 5, 2022:- Until July 2022, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) used to publish a regular report that stated the number of “fully vaccinated” people who had been hospitalized from COVID-19 and the number who had died. Then, when the number of deaths passed 3,000, DPH stopped publishing its weekly report.

In November I submitted a public records request to DPH asking for the new numbers. Today I received the response.

[T]here have been 314 COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough deaths among vaccinated MA residents reported to the Department between June 26, 2022- September 3, 2022. A COVID-19 breakthrough case is defined as an individual who has tested positive for COVID19 at least 14 days after being “fully vaccinated” against COVID-19.

So there you have it. In the 69-day period June 26-September 3, 2022, 314 people died of COVID-19, a disease against which they were “fully vaccinated.” That number is in addition to the 3,000+ “fully vaccinated” people who had died before DPH stopped publishing the figures.

A reminder of why these numbers matter to those of us who do not know the victims or the families and friends they left behind: Hundreds of people in Massachusetts were discharged from their jobs because their religious beliefs prevented them being injected with products advertised as “COVID-19 vaccines.” Their employers, including State government agencies, contend that letting them continue working without being injected would have been an “undue hardship,” i.e. the un-injected workers were more likely to catch and spread COVID-19 than the injected workers.

That contention rests entirely on the premise that the injections stop you catching the disease. When, if ever, will employers just admit the obvious falsity of this belief? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.

As Allysia Finley points out in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal:

But by last fall it was clear that vaccinated Americans were catching and spreading the virus. Then the administration rolled out third doses it claimed would strengthen individual and collective protection.

To many Americans, the boosters came as a bait-and-switch. They’d been led to believe vaccines offered a lifelong warranty against infection. Public-health officials at the outset should have set more realistic expectations.

… The CDC’s website in September showed that, since April, Americans who got the original boosters were testing positive at higher rates than those who had only two doses.

Employers — government agencies in particular — that imposed the No Jab, No Job policy under false pretenses should own up and admit that they either did not know the products did not work, or knew and lied about it. Is that really too much to ask? That’s another rhetorical question.

Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

COVID 19, employment law, law

Vaccines contaminated, says congressional report

May 20, 2022:- In a development that will be of interest to people discharged because of the No Jab, No Job policy (e.g. 1,000 or so State employees in Massachusetts) a congressional report has revealed that approximately 400 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had to be destroyed for “quality control reasons.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis just issued a report titled The Coronavirus Vaccine Manufacturing Failures of Emergent Biolsolutions. It describes cross-contamination in Emergent’s production of Johnson& Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines. For the report click here; for the subcommittee, click here.

If you were one of those State employees who thought you had the right to consider this sort of information (contamination at the vaxx plant) before deciding to receive or decline a COVID-19 shot, you quickly learned that your boss had other ideas.

In Executive Order 595, which mandated vaccines for executive-branch employees, Governor Baker wrote:

WHEREAS, COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, as evidenced by the fact that COVID-19 vaccines have satisfied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality needed to permit widespread use and distribution, and to date, more than 357 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been safely administered in the United States, with more than 9 million safely administered in the Commonwealth, and negative side effects have proven exceedingly rare…

You didn’t get to decide whether to receive the jab. Governor Baker made that decision for you when he issued Executive Order 595 on August 19, 2021. Meanwhile, according to the congressional report:

Due to poor quality control approximately 240 million vaccine doses had to be destroyed in late 2020 and early 2021— significantly more than revealed previously. Following the discovery that Emergent had cross-contaminated vaccine doses in March 2021, the Biden Administration halted Emergent’s manufacturing from April to July 2021.

The discovery about the contamination was in March 2021. So that was before August 19, 2021. The report continues:

After Emergent was permitted to resume manufacturing in July 2021, an additional 90 million newly manufactured coronavirus vaccine doses had to be destroyed for quality control reasons, and 135 million remain sequestered pending further testing.

Was the trouble with the vaccines top secret? Not at all. Here’s a quote from an article published in April 2021 (four months before Governor Baker issued E.O. 595):

An FDA report cites multiple failures in an Emergent BioSolutions plant tapped to produce vaccines for Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. The vaccine plant had been forced to discard up to 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine in a single manufacturing batch.

Here’s a quote from another article published in April 2021:

An FDA report has illuminated problems at Emergent BioSolution’s Baltimore manufacturing site, where the CDMO recently had to scrap up to 15 million Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine doses over a production error.

Thing is, the FDA flagged Emergent for very similar issues almost a year ago to the day. During an April 2020 inspection of the CDMO’s contract testing laboratory, the FDA said Emergent failed to adequately prevent data tampering or deletion, neglected to follow its quality control procedures or put them in writing and, notably, didn’t do enough to stop contamination or mix-ups. 

I mention all this because the State, whether acting as government or as employer, should allow people to make their own decisions about medical interventions. Is this my quirky personal predilection? No, it’s a principle that the United States endorsed as part of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics & Human Rights, article 6 of which provides:

Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.

Consent is not “free” when your lack of consent leads to lack of your job. And I think loss of one’s job counts as a “disadvantage or prejudice.” Is the consent “informed” when your Governor issues an official order proclaiming the product’s safety? Answers on a postcard, please.

If you or someone you know lost a State job because of Executive Order 595, please feel free to contact my office for a free consult.

By the way, for the latest figures on COVID-19 hospitalizations in Massachusetts, click here. Spoiler alert: the percentage of COVID-19 patients who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 is 65%.

Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
discrimination, discrimination defense,, law

Sunshine Week

March 15, 2022:- It’s Sunshine Week, a time to promote open government. Who says so? The News Leaders Association.

People who refer to themselves as “News Leaders” make me suspicious, for reasons that I will not sidetrack myself by going into. So staying focused (my suspicions of the News Leadership notwithstanding) and because the concept of Sunshine Week appeals to me, I will mark the event by recounting what I learned from the response to one of my recent public records requests, more specifically the discovery that a particular record does not seem to exist.

Hate Crime Hotline

After the election of Donald Trump (R), Maura Healey (D), who is the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, issued a press release:

“Following reports of harassment and intimidation of racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women, LGBTQ individuals and immigrants since Election Day, Attorney General Maura Healey today announced that her office has launched a new hotline for Massachusetts residents to report such incidents.”

At the time, I was reading about both (1) actual hate crimes, and (2) hate crime hoaxes, so the hotline caught my attention. I wondered what, if anything, would happen in response to calls that people made to the hotline and how, if at all, the Attorney General would measure the efficacy of the hotline. Whether public officials will bother to evaluate the effectiveness of a publicly-funded initiative (or even bother to think about how they would evaluate its effectiveness) is, indeed, one of the things that I wonder about.

Measuring Success

Hate crimes are heinous. So if you receive a report of one, I think you should look into it, especially if you are the Commonwealth’s top law-enforcement official and you have set up a hotline for people to call. You might also want to keep track of the complaints. This, I thought, is what Attorney General Healey will do because according to the press release:

The hotline will be managed by attorneys and staff in the AG’s Office. While not every incident will be appropriate for legal action, the AG’s Office will be tracking reports and appropriate matters may be referred to local law enforcement or the Attorney General’s Criminal Bureau.

Based on that statement, it seemed reasonable to believe that the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) would be tracking reports and, perhaps, referring appropriate matters to local law enforcement or the Attorney General’s Criminal Bureau.

One very good reason to keep track of reports and of how many you refer to law enforcement and what happens to the referral thereafter is this: Without that knowledge, you do not know whether the hotline works. Collating that information is essential to determining whether this particular policy — a hate crime hotline — has any effect on hate crimes.

If the hotline works, hallelujah. If it does not work, stop wasting those resources on a failed initiative and devote them instead to an initiative that is more likely to reduce hate crimes.

That, of course, assumes that the purpose of the hotline is to help reduce hate crimes as opposed to, say, conveying the message that the election of Donald Trump led to an increase in hate crimes.

Public Records Request

In January 2022, I submitted a public records request (the Massachusetts equivalent of a federal FOIA request) to the AGO asking for, among other things, the total number of calls received since the hotline’s inception. This, according to the AGO’s response is 5,929. I was surprised not so much by the total number as by how many were from other States (quite a few from California, in particular Los Angeles).

Another fact that I deem worthy of note is that 13 of the calls were from Amherst, where I live, so I have followed up with a public records request to the local police department to find out what, if anything, happened with these 13 hotline complaints.

In addition to the total number of calls, I asked for:

  • The number of complaints received via the hotline referred to local law enforcement or the Attorney General’s Criminal Bureau, and
  • Investigations commenced as a result of calls to the hotline, and prosecutions and convictions arising therefrom.

Regarding these two items, the AGO answered:

[W]e do not track our cases in a manner in which we could identify responsive records without spending an undetermined, yet voluminous, amount of time. It would require that we search, both electronically and manually, through every electronic and paper record made or received by AGO staff in multiple Bureaus and Divisions and review all of the records so found for applicable exemptions and privileges.

What I learned from this statement is that the AGO does not have a clear idea of how many hotline complaints were referred to local law enforcement or how many hotline calls resulted in investigations, prosecutions, and convictions. To find out, the folks at the AGO would have to really, really look into it, which would take an “undetermined, yet voluminous, amount of time.”

This matters. The AGO urged “any Massachusetts resident who has witnessed or experienced bias-motivated threats, harassment or violence” to call the hotline. And many Massachusetts residents did, along with residents of many other places (including more than one might have expected from LA for some reason). There have been almost 6,000 hotline calls logged over the last 5 years or so.

So what happened to those complaints? How many did the AGO refer to local law enforcement, how many were investigated, and how many led to convictions? The AGO has not collated all that information.

This is why public records requests are useful. With them, we can learn not only what records our public officials make, but also what sort of records our public officials do not consider it worth making.

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

COVID 19, discrimination, employment law, law, religious freedom

Captain Albert Brox and religious liberty

March 1, 2022:- Today Attorney Patrick Daubert talked with me about the case of Captain Albert Brox v. Wood’s Hole, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket Steamship Authority, which concerns religious liberty and medical-product mandates. Attorney Daubert represents employees of a State agency who are seeking religious exemptions from the mandate that their employer imposed at the beginning of the year. After the State court judge enjoined the authority from enforcing its mandate, the authority removed the case to federal court.

To watch and listen to the conversation, click here.

Photo by Jack Sharp on Unsplash
COVID 19, discrimination, employment law, law, religious freedom

No Jab, No Job: Are you a public employee facing discrimination?

If you are a State or municipal employee facing religious discrimination, I would like to hear from you.

For example, if your employer requires you to receive a product known as a “COVID-19 vaccine” as a condition of your employment (the No Jab, No Job rule) and refuses your request for a religious exemption, you may have legal recourse. To set up a free 20-minute consult, use the contact form below.

Religious Freedom

As you may know, Massachusetts law (M.G.L. c. 151B) prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. If your employer denied your request for a religious exemption from the No Jab, No Job rule, you may have a claim under that law. The place to file your claim is the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) and the filing deadline is 300 days after the discriminatory act.

This is a complicated and shifting area of law, so it is worth reading up on the subject even before talking to a lawyer. The New Civil Liberties Alliance has articles and press releases about its courtroom efforts against mandates, the Pacific Justice Institute provides free resources on protecting religious rights in the workplace, and the Christian Legal Aid Society offers a Religious Freedom Toolkit. You may also want to check out Attorney Aaron Siri’s site, Injecting Freedom.

Genetic Discrimination

In addition to the law against religious discrimination, Massachusetts also forbids discrimination on the basis of genetic information. Similarly, a federal statute called the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA, Title II) makes it unlawful for an employer

to limit, segregate, or classify the employees of the employer in any way that would deprive or tend to deprive any employee of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect the status of the employee as an employee, because of genetic information with respect to the employee.

This information page and Q&A show where the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) stands on GINA and vaccines. Bear in mind, these EEOC documents are not law (they are not statutes, regulations, or judicial decisions) but courts usually defer to the EEOC when the agency is interpreting the statutes in its purview. The EEOC documents are helpful insights for employees who wish to use GINA to challenge the No Jab, No Job rule.

Bioethics

Another helpful resource for employees is Article 6 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which the General Conference of UNESCO adopted in 2005.

The relevant paragraph of Article 6 provides that:

Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.

Although it does not have the force of law, the Declaration is something that judges may choose to take note of in some cases, e.g. the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Abdullahi v. Pfizer, a case about Pfizer’s drug trials in Nigeria.

The principle of prior, free, informed consent should guide courts and adjudicatory bodies like the MCAD when considering No Jab, No Job cases.

Consult

To set up a consult, please use this form.

COVID 19, employment law, law, separation of powers

Court nixes vax mandate

On November 12, 2021, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed its decision to stay (pause) the COVID-19 vaccine mandate that President Biden issued via the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA). You can read the decision here.

The court had several reasons for finding the mandate unlawful, including the following:

[T]he Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a “grave danger” in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat). The Mandate’s stated impetus—a purported “emergency” that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to—is unavailing as well.

With regard to the supposed “emergency” that could justify the OHSA rule, the court added:

And, of course, this all assumes that COVID-19 poses any significant danger to workers to begin with; for the more than seventy-eight percent of Americans aged 12 and older either fully or partially inoculated against it, the virus poses—the Administration assures us—little risk at all.

As with the President Biden’s use of the CDC to ban evictions for non-payment of rent, this latest attempt to usurp the legislative function has failed, for the time being anyway.

President Joe Biden

Adam Schultz, photographer

Official portrait of President Joe Biden, taken in the Library room at the White House

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppbd.01261/

discrimination defense,, employment law, law, massachusetts, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

New rules in effect at MCAD

February 28, 2020:- New rules of procedure have taken effect at the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD). One welcome addition: Rule 1.13(9)(b)(3), which allows for a stay of the investigation pending the adjudication of a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction (my personal hobbyhorse). I’ll drink to that.

For my earlier post on the subject, click here.

alcoholic beverage bar beer beverage
New MCAD rules: I’ll drink to that.

discrimination, discrimination defense massachusetts,, law, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

Discrimination regs: public hearing in Springfield

September 19, 2019:-  At 12 noon on October 9 in its Springfield office, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) will hold a public hearing on proposed changes to its procedural regulations. For a link to the notice click here.

One proposal in particular caught my eye, as I mentioned in a previous post, and here is the text of the comment I submitted to the MCAD in support of it:

804 CMR 1.13(9)(b)(3)

The proposed rule provides that “where the Commission’s jurisdiction or authority to proceed is challenged by a motion filed with the Commission, the Investigating Commissioner may stay investigation of the merits of the charge pending a ruling on the motion.”

As an attorney who has previously complained about the Commission investigating charges without having adjudicated a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, I welcome this proposal.  A clear and unambiguous grant of discretion to issue a stay would be a significant improvement on the current situation.

However, where a respondent’s motion raises the limitation period I believe that a stay should be mandatory not discretionary.  The purpose of a statute of limitation is to provide a degree of certainty and predictability, which purpose is undermined when investigations commence after the statutory deadline has passed.  Accordingly, where a motion seeks dismissal based on the expiry of the limitation period, the Commission should only continue to investigate after determining that the period has not expired and the Commission does, in fact, have jurisdiction.

In order to maintain the principle of separation of powers (one of the bulwarks of liberty), agencies should operate within, not beyond, their statutory remit. Conducting an investigation without jurisdiction violates that principle. It should not happen. This proposed regulation goes some way toward preventing the MCAD exceeding its authority, so I hope that it makes the final cut.

I intend to be at the public hearing in Springfield and to post a brief report of what, if anything, occurs. Probably it will not be necessary to arrive hours ahead of time and queue for a seat. After all, on October 9 many Bay Staters will be busy observing the anniversary of the banishment of Roger Williams in 1635 or celebrating Leif Erikson Day. Quite possibly, therefore, there may not be much of a crowd at the mid-week, noontime meeting to discuss amendments to the MCAD’s procedural regulations. But you never know. In the meantime, if readers would like to know more about the issue, please post a comment or email me.

cropped-cropped-petervickery_6-standing
Peter Vickery, Esq.

discrimination, discrimination defense massachusetts,, discrimination defense,, employment law, law, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

Speed-up at MCAD

February 9, 2017:- Earlier this month the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) announced a significant cut in its backlog of cases.

In 2016, the agency substantially reduced the number of cases that were more than 2 years old. Of the 3,811 investigations currently open at the MCAD, just 318 remain over 2 years old, down from 1,134 in 2015, a reduction of 72%.

Approximately 3,000 new complaints are filed with the MCAD every year, so the dramatic reduction in the old cases is quite an achievement. Complainants and respondents alike should hope that the agency manages to maintain this level of efficiency.

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Peter Vickery, Esq.

 

discrimination, discrimination defense,, free speech, law, massachusetts, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

OK to exclude gay men, says MCAD

Must a charity that offers free reconstructive surgery to female victims of domestic violence also provide those services to a gay man? No, said the MCAD in a decision last September. Only two months earlier the Legislature and Governor had prohibited places of public accommodations from excluding men from women’s restrooms and locker rooms, so you might think the case would have grabbed the odd headline, but apart from this Mass Lawyers Weekly article it received surprisingly little media attention.

The respondent was the R.O.S.E (Regaining One’s Self Esteem) Fund, a non-profit that seeks to help women who are the survivors of domestic violence. In 2008 it declined to extend its services to Kevin Doran, whose male partner had assaulted him, leaving him with broken teeth and facial bones. With the support of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), Mr. Doran argued that the ROSE Fund is a place of public accommodation and that by turning him away it had violated the Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws.

In 2014 an MCAD hearing officer ruled in favor of the ROSE Fund, finding that the organization was not a place of public accommodation. In its appeal brief GLAD said the decision meant that “ROSE can now discriminate not only against men, but also on the basis of race, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and disability as well.”

Nevertheless the full three-member Commission upheld the 2014 decision on First Amendment grounds:

“The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the venerable history of the public accommodation laws in Massachusetts, but when applied to expressive activity, the laws may not act to compel certain speech in violation of the First Amendment.”

For that reason, the Commission held that “a private charity set up with the express purpose of serving a narrow community may be allowed to make choices about whom to serve, based on the purpose of the organization and consistent selection criteria.”

This is a very narrow ruling. The MCAD limits its First Amendment expressive-activity exception to a thin sliver of entities: tax-exempt corporations set up to serve a “narrow community,” as opposed to regular businesses and individuals who do not have tax-exempt status and cater to the general public.  The decision sits awkwardly alongside expressive-conduct cases from other jurisdictions such as Elane Photography (photographers fined for refusing to photograph same-sex commitment ceremony) and Barronnelle Stutzman (flower arranger fined for refusing to design arrangement for her friend’s same-sex wedding). In those cases, the fact that the defendants’ businesses consisted of expressive activity did not exempt them from the legal obligation to provide their services at same-sex weddings. If those are not examples of the state “compelling certain speech” I don’t know what is.

And as for why tax-exempt corporations should have greater free-speech rights than the rest of us, that is not something the MCAD’s Doran decision addresses.

IMG_7031
Peter Vickery, Esq.

discrimination defense,, employment law, law, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

Tick, tock: Justice delayed

Invidious discrimination does occur, and we are fortunate to have an agency tailor-made to address it, namely the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD). But the current four-year backlog of cases at the MCAD is hurting litigants on both sides, employers and employees alike. Justice delayed is justice denied, as the saying goes. And most reasonable people would agree that the MCAD should not handle cases outside its jurisdiction.

So what should we do about the problem? Check out my article in the current edition of the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Lawyers Journal by clicking here.

IMG_7031
Attorney Peter Vickery

discrimination, law, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

New MCAD guidance on transgender discrimination

September 1, 2016:- Employers take note: In compliance with the Act Relative to Transgender Discrimination that Governor Baker signed into law in July, earlier today the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) filed with the Clerk of the House of Representatives its Gender Identity Guidance. Much of the document is old, a restatement of the MCAD’s 2015 Advisory, including the “best practices” e.g. “update personnel records, email systems, and other documents to reflect [an] employee’s stated name and gender identity, and ensure confidentiality of any prior documentation of an employee’s pre-transition name or gender marker.”

But the section of the Guidance regarding proof of gender identity and restrooms (Part III. D) is new. Readers will recall that the statute requires that employers allow employees and members of the public to use the restroom “consistent with their gender identity.” The Guidance states that “[r]equiring an employee to provide identification or proof of any particular medical procedure (including gender affirming surgery) in order to access gender designated facilities, may be evidence of discriminatory bias” (emphasis added).

This is important to note because an earlier part of the Guidance (III. A: Definition of Gender Identity) states that when it investigates claims of discrimination the MCAD may look at “medical records from medical or other professionals involved in the treatment or transition of the individual seeking, in the process of, or who has completed gender transition.”

In a nutshell: When an employee files a discrimination claim against the employer the MCAD can consider evidence of a medical procedure, but ahead of time — unless it wishes to invite an MCAD investigation — an employer must not ask an employee for proof of any particular medical procedure.

IMG_7031
Peter Vickery, Esq.

discrimination, employment law, law, legislative drafting, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

No sex please, we’re Bay Staters

July 22, 2016:- When Governor Baker signs into law Senate Bill 2199, titled “An Act to Establish Pay Equity,” Massachusetts employment law will un-define (not merely re-define) an important word. Here is the text of the very first section of the bill:

Section 1 of chapter 149 of the General Laws, as appearing in the 2014 Official Edition, is hereby amended by striking out the definition of “Woman”.

So, farewell “woman,” a word that the statute used to define as “a female eighteen or over” but now does not define at all.

And farewell “sex,” too. Out with the hackneyed old phrase “no employer shall discriminate in any way in the payment of wages as between the sexes,” and in with the new: “No employer shall discriminate in any way on the basis of gender in the payment of wages.”

Pondering the replacement of sex with gender, and mulling over one of the other laws enacted this session, An Act Relative to Transgender Discrimination, which prohibits discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of gender identity, I see the potential for some mischief.

Could an employer charged with discriminating on the basis of gender raise the defense that the gender of her employees is information to which she is not privy? After all, gender is a matter of identity not physiology. I know this because I just read it in the relevant statute (clause 59, if you’re curious), which tells me in pertinent part:

“Gender identity” shall mean a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth.

Got that? Gender identity means “gender-related identity, appearance or behavior.” If you are not satisfied with that definition and worry about the challenges of establishing gender identity in the courtroom, fear not; the Legislature recognized the need for greater clarity as to “when and how gender identity may be evidenced” and saw the need for guidance. In addition to having a stab at it themselves (the statute says that litigants may offer any of the following: “medical history, care or treatment of the gender-related identity, consistent and uniform assertion of the gender-related identity, or any other evidence that the gender-related identity is sincerely held as part of a person’s core identity”) lawmakers delegated the task of crafting said guidance to the Attorney General and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. They are due to report to the Legislature by September 1, 2016.

In the meantime, what do we know? Well, we have replaced wage discrimination on the basis of sex (a matter of physiology) with wage discrimination on the basis of gender (a matter of identity). Of course, how a person “identifies” is not always obvious, and some think it shows rather poor manners to ask. So in the inevitable litigation, I can imagine a cross-examination of an employer along these lines:

Q. Does your employee Valery earn more than your employee Valerie for comparable work?

A. Yes.

Q. What gender is Valery?

A.  I don’t know.

Q. What about Valerie?

A. No idea.

Goodbye woman, goodbye sex. Hello protracted litigation.

IMG_7031
Attorney Peter Vickery

 

 

 

 

 

discrimination, employment law, law, legislative drafting, massachusetts, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

Commission creep: discrimination agency asserts jurisdiction in late-filed cases

July 1, 2016:-  The term “mission creep” refers to a military operation that gradually expands beyond its stated objectives. A new report provides evidence of a government commission repeatedly extending its reach beyond the parameters laid out in its statutory remit, a phenomenon I hereby dub “commission creep.”

The State Auditor has published an official report on the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) and in addition to revealing the usual, garden-variety problems that bedevil state agencies (e.g. mismanagement, inefficiency,  and poor book-keeping) it confirms a long-harbored suspicion: The MCAD asserts jurisdiction where it has none. This matters not only to the small business owners who find themselves the target of costly investigations that drag on for years, but to all citizens who expect public servants to abide by one of the bedrock principles of constitutional government, namely the separation of powers (see Article 30 of the Massachusetts Constitution).

Despite clear statutory language confining its jurisdiction to cases filed within 300 days of the last allegedly discriminatory act, the Commission investigates cases filed after the deadline. And it does so on a scale that suggests something more than ineptitude, no mere unfortunate series of oopsy daisy events.

So that readers may judge for themselves, here is the text of the statute (section 5 of chapter 151B of the General Laws) in words as clear and unambiguous as the English language permits:

Any complaint filed pursuant to this section must be so filed within 300 days after the alleged act of discrimination.

The word must falls into the category of words legislative drafters call mandatory, as opposed to precatory or hortatory. In the vernacular, it is hard not mushy.

Nevertheless, the State Auditor’s report (p. 11) reveals that in the three-year period of the audit (2012-2015) the MCAD processed at least  123 separate cases where it lacked subject matter jurisdiction because the applicable statute of limitations had run its course:

[D]uring our audit period, MCAD accepted 123 complaints beyond the 300-day timeframe for complainants to file their complaints. MCAD regulations allow for this 300-day timeframe to be extended under certain conditions, but there was no documentation in the case files to substantiate that any of these complaints met those conditions.

I cannot tell whether the auditors independently identified the 123 cases or simply made note of the instances where the MCAD itself had determined that it lacked jurisdiction on the basis of the limitation period. If the latter, then the determination would have come at the end of the MCAD’s investigative phase, the point at which the Commission issues a Lack of Probable Cause (LOPC) finding. On average that point now arrives four years — yes, four years — after the filing of the complaint. In the meantime MCAD investigators will have required the employer to devote hours responding to questions and demands for internal documents and to attending “investigative conferences” at the agency’s offices.

Either way, this is an extraordinary finding on the part of the State Auditor. The 300-day deadline is not some off-the-cuff recommendation or flexible guideline but a statutory limitation. The Legislature decided that the deadline for filing a discrimination complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) is 300 days, and only the Legislature can amend a statute. By flouting the limitation period so often, the MCAD has arrogated to itself the power to legislate, a power the Massachusetts Constitution expressly reserves to the legislative branch.

The report bears out something I have suspected for some years, i.e. that the MCAD investigates cases where it clearly lacks jurisdiction. Because of my experience with the MCAD, after the 2014 gubernatorial election I sent the incoming Baker-Polito administration a proposal that would remedy the problem, and the associated problem of the MCAD improperly asserting jurisdiction over employers with fewer than six employees (another statutory limit on the MCAD’s jurisdiction called the “small-business exemption”). My proposal is this:

If a respondent files a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, the MCAD shall suspend its investigation until it has adjudicated the motion.

The proposal does not require action on the part of the Legislature. With a nudge from the Governor the Commissioners could make it happen via a simple amendment to the MCAD’s regulations, with proper notice and comment. Under my proposal, the MCAD would have to deal with the threshold matter of jurisdiction before putting the employer to the expense of a full-blown, years-long investigation.

I submitted this suggestion back in January 2015.  In view of the State Auditor’s findings, I shall re-send it.

IMG_7031
Peter Vickery, Esq.

discrimination, law, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad, supreme court of the united states, supreme judicial court, zoning

SJC: unintentional housing discrimination unlawful

April 13, 2016:- From now on, developers can be sued for housing discrimination in Massachusetts even if they did not intend to discriminate and complied with all applicable laws.

In a major decision, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) held that “a disparate impact claim is cognizable even if a defendant who is a private owner adheres to statutory, regulatory, and contractual obligations.”  The case is Burbank Apartments Tenants Association v. Kargman and it is consistent with Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc.  Like SCOTUS, the SJC rationalized its decision by analogizing to employment law: “[W]e conclude from our employment discrimination precedent that… [the disparate impact] theory of liability is cognizable under G.L. c. 151B, §§ 4(6), (7), and (11).”

For my earlier post on the subject, click here.

Justin Sargent 6
Peter Vickery, Esq.

discrimination, employment law, law, massachusetts commission against discrimination, mcad

Older, white man wins discrimination case

Springfield, Mass. :- It doesn’t happen every day, or very often at all for that matter, so this case merits a mention. An employer terminated a 64-year old, White, male employee in favor of hiring a “younger more aggressive sales person who spoke Spanish and understood Latino culture.”  The older White man sued for age and ethnicity discrimination and won.

bateman cartoon

A hearing officer at the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) ordered the company to pay $11,100.00 in lost wages and $5,000.00 for emotional distress.  You can read the full decision (issued January 20, 2016) here.

black history month, discrimination, eminent domain, law, supreme court of the united states

Court strikes down racial segregation ordinance

February 2016:– It was 100 years ago that the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral argument in Buchanan v. Warley, in which it struck down a Louisville, Kentucky, city ordinance that prohibited Black people from moving to city blocks where the majority of residents were White, and vice versa. The decision, written by Justice William R. Day, was unanimous. There was no dissent, not even from Chief Justice — and former Confederate officer — Edward Douglas White, who had voted with the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson. In observance of Black History Month, and in view of present-day calls for segregation on campus (strange but true), I offer a conspectus of Buchanan v. Warley, an important victory in the struggle for liberty and equality.

The case arose when Post Office employee and part-time newspaper publisher William Warley, who was Black and a leading member of the Louisville NAACP, entered a contract to buy a plot of land from real-estate agent Charles H. Buchanan, who was White. Both men opposed the city ordinance and went to court in order to test its constitutionality. To that end, their contract contained a clause that said the buyer (Warley) would only close the deal if he had the right under the laws of Kentucky and Louisville “to occupy said premises as a resident.” This condition, of course, was one that could not be met, and it provided Buchanan with a basis for asking the circuit court for specific performance, i.e. an order compelling Warley to pay for the property.

Neither the circuit court nor the Kentucky Court of Appeals would order Warley to pay for a property he could not lawfully occupy, reasoning that the ordinance gave Warley a complete defense. So the case went up to the Supreme Court of the United States, with Buchanan arguing that the ordinance could not provide Warley with a defense because it was unconstitutional. This was a situation the ordinance’s drafters had foreseen, and they had designed it with a constitutional challenge in mind.

The ordinance started out as a policy proposal from a Louisville resident by the name of W.D. Binford, who  worked as a manager at a local newspaper. He and his allies knew about the constitutional infirmities that had undone segregation ordinances in Baltimore and elsewhere, and planned a workaround.  For a detailed account of the campaign see Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930, by George C. Wright; As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods, by Stephen Grant Meyer; and Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948, by David Delaney.

Binford pitched the enforced-segregation idea to a luncheon gathering of the city’s real-estate agents, a group called the Real Estate Exchange. He suggested a measure free of the flaws that had stymied other segregation ordinances. Perhaps because of the failure in Baltimore, Binford’s speech met with little enthusiasm. But he started organizing, and soon had enough White neighborhood associations on his side to make property-owners and politicians take notice.

So, although initially tepid, many real-estate agents came around to Binford’s suggestion. Not J.D. Wright, however, an officer of the Real Estate Exchange, who appeared alongside William Stewart of the NAACP to argue against the proposed ordinance at the city council hearing. But Wright and Stewart did not prevail. The force that they and other opponents of segregation were battling against was the political equivalent of rampant climate change.

Segregation was on the rise across much of the country, and one of its most ardent advocates, Woodrow Wilson, occupied the White House. In Louisville, Binford and his fellow activists were threatening to throw out any councilors who failed to back their proposal; they were well organized, vocal, and enjoyed the support of the local Democratic newspaper, the Times. Not surprisingly, in view of the grassroots activism, the city council voted 21:0 in favor, and on May 11, 1914, the mayor, a Democrat named John H. Bushemeyer, signed into law a measure titled,

“An ordinance to prevent conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races in the City of Louisville, and to preserve the public peace and promote the general welfare by making reasonable provisions requiring, as far as practicable, the use of separate blocks for residences, places of abode and places of assembly by white and colored people respectively.”

Banning Black people from living on the same block as White people was the way to “prevent ill-feeling,” the ordinance declared, so certain provisions were necessary. What sort of provisions? “Reasonable” ones. They did not appear all that reasonable to the members of the NAACP, who set in motion the test case.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, the plaintiff, Buchanan, was represented by three NAACP lawyers, including the organization’s president, Moorfield Storey. This article provides a concise description of Storey’s line of argument and the significance of the Court’s decision (scroll down to the section headed “civil rights and property rights”).

In addition to Storey’s, the NAACP filed an amicus brief written by William Ashbie Hawkins, a Black attorney with a practice in Maryland who “participated in almost every major civil rights case in Maryland during the first quarter of the Twentieth Century… [and] ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for the United States Senate [in 1920], a first for a black citizen of Maryland,” according to J. Clay Smith in Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944. It is worth remembering that Hawkins was born in 1862 in Lynchburg, Virginia — which at the time housed a prison camp for Union POWs — so, although the record is not clear, it is likely that he was born into slavery. Property rights and liberty of contract must have had a powerful import to someone the law had until recently considered to be property with no right to enter into contracts of his own.

The NAACP argued that the ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection including “the right to acquire and possess property of every kind [and] to dispose of it and to live upon one’s own land.” In a phrase that the Court found persuasive, Storey argued that the ordinance “destroys, without due process of law, fundamental rights attached by law to the ownership of property.”

In response, the attorneys advocating for the validity of the ordinance (ironically, representing Warley) claimed that “the use of property and liberty of contract are subject to reasonable police regulations, and their enforcement does not deprive a person of property without due process of law.” Property rights are not absolute, they contended. After all, cities are free to limit the height of buildings and prohibit billboards in residential neighborhoods: The segregation ordinance was analogous to regulations of that sort, they claimed.

The Court came down on the side of the NAACP.  It acknowledged the government’s police power, noting that “legitimate business may… be regulated in the interest of the public.” But it concluded:

We think this attempt to prevent alienation of the property in question to a person of color was not a legitimate exercise of the police power of the State, and is in direct violation of the fundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution preventing state interference with property rights except by due process of law. That being the case the ordinance cannot stand.

This Black History Month, I tip my hat to the lawyers and litigants of the NAACP who brought about the decision in Buchanan v Warley.  In particular, I honor the memory of Attorney William Ashbie Hawkins, and William Warley, whose service to justice the Wilson administration saluted by firing from him from his job in the Post Office. May they rest in peace.

Peter Vickery July 2012