Alito v. Civil Rights: A Foreshadowing

Several of the cases recently handed down by the Supreme Court have been interesting more for what they tell us about the future than for the cases themselves. An excellent example is today’s decision in Burlington Northern v. White, the case where a woman was suing under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act because she was removed from her primary job as a forklift operator by a overtly sexist supervisor and assigned to much worse positions. The case was anticlimactic in a good way; the Court unanimously ruled that White had a case under the law and upheld the jury’s verdict in her favor. However, note that Alito filed a concurrence in which he gave a (highly strained) reading of Title VII that would both narrow the definition of what constitutes “retaliation” and confine it strictly to workplace-based retaliation (although of course other forms of retaliation could have the same disincentives to report illegal behavior that the CRA is trying to prevent.) In other words, Alito wants to chip away the statutory civil rights of litigants accepted by those radical civil rights activists Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Which couldn’t have been more obvious at the time of his nomination.