June 24, 2013, was a good day for employers. Two decisions came down from the U.S. Supreme Court that bode well for defense attorneys by limiting claimants chances of prevailing on retaliation claims and claims against employers for vicarious liability for the illegal actions of putative supervisors. Each case had the exact same split, with Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts joining the majority opinion, and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan offering dissenting opinions.
In University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Naiel Nassar, the respondent was a doctor of internal medicine and specialized in infectious diseases at the medical center. Naiel Nassar also happened to be of Middle Eastern descent. In 2004, Dr. Beth Levine became his ultimate supervisor and allegedly had a bias against the respondent based upon his religion and ethnicity, as evidenced by unjustified scrutiny of Nassar’s billing practices and comments such as, “Middle Easterners are lazy.”
