Court Limits Public-Worker Claims

Unique Complaint of Bias Disallowed as Equal-Protection Case

The Supreme Court decided yesterday that public employees may not bring their discrimination complaints to federal court when they are alleging that adverse job actions resulted from arbitrary or malicious reasons unique to their situation.

"Such a 'class of one' theory of equal protection has no place in the public employment context," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority in a 6 to 3 decision involving Anup Engquist, an Oregon public employee whose job was eliminated after what she said were repeated problems with her boss.

"Public employees typically have a variety of protections from just the sort of personnel actions about which Engquist complains," Roberts wrote, "but the Equal Protection Clause is not one of them."

As the court continued to finish the work of its current term, it also announced yesterday a familiar case that it will hear once again in the term beginning in October. The justices will review the Oregon Supreme Court's decision this year upholding nearly $80 million in punitive damages against Philip Morris in a case brought by the family of smoker Jesse Williams, who died of lung cancer in 1997.

The justices last year said in Philip Morris v. Williams that the Oregon court had erred in upholding the award and sent the case back, ruling that, while a jury may consider whether a company's conduct was harmful to others, it could not impose punishment based on harm to those who were not parties to the suit. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the dissenters in the case, wrote that the court's precedents were "less than crystalline."

When the Oregon court again said the award was properly reached, based on state law, Philip Morris claimed that it had ignored the Supreme Court's instructions. But lawyers for Williams's widow, Mayola, said the state court had "faithfully followed" the decision.

The justices said that although they were accepting the case, they would rule only on how the Oregon court handled the case, not the larger question of whether such a large punitive-damages award violates the Constitution. According to court papers, the parties said the original $79.5 million award has grown with interest to more than $140 million.

In the public employee case, Engquist sued after her job was eliminated following years of what she said was disparate treatment by her bosses. She sued under the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, alleging discrimination on the basis of her sex, race and national origin, and as a "class of one," alleging that she was fired simply for "arbitrary, vindictive, and malicious reasons."

A jury rejected her claims of discrimination based on her sex, race and national origin, but awarded her compensatory and punitive damages on her "class of one" claim. Engquist was born in India.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco reversed the decision. Even though other courts around the country had agreed that such claims could go forward, the court said extending the protection to public employees would be undue judicial interference in state employment practices.

The Supreme Court's majority agreed. Roberts acknowledged that the court had decided in a 2000 case that an individual property owner had the right to sue the government over arbitrary treatment by city officials. But there is a difference between government's legislative and regulatory actions and its employment practices, Roberts said.

Employment decisions "are quite often subjective and individualized, resting on a wide array of factors that are difficult to articulate and quantify," Roberts wrote.

"The practical problem with allowing class-of-one claims to go forward in this context is not that it will be too easy for plaintiffs to prevail, but that governments will be forced to defend a multitude of such claims in the first place, and courts will be obliged to sort through them in a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack," he said.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in a dissent joined by Justices David H. Souter and Ginsburg, said that the hypothetical needle is clearly identified in Engquist's complaint and that it should not be necessary to prohibit all such suits in order for the courts to decide which ones have merit.

"Even if some surgery were truly necessary to prevent government from being forced to defend a multitude of equal protection 'class of one' claims," Stevens wrote, "the Court should use a scalpel rather than a meat-axe."

The case is Engquist v. Oregon Department of Agriculture.