A lawsuit in which a former Miami-Dade police sergeant claims his firing was racially motivated drew a special concurrence from Senior Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, who called for his court to reconsider a procedure for ruling on summary judgments.

Tjoflat took issue with the use of the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting framework, a three-part analysis used when retaliation claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act are based only on circumstantial evidence.