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In brief

• Supreme Court rejects heightened burden for majority plaintiffs under Title VII.
• Decision may open door to more reverse discrimination claims.
• Justice Thomas questions continued use of McDonnell Douglas framework.
• Massachusetts attorneys defend framework’s utility despite national debate.

Local employment attorneys said they were not surprised that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided recently that the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had made it too difficult for a heterosexual woman’s discrimination claim to survive summary judgment.

They said a bigger curiosity was Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurrence, which Justice Neil M. Gorsuch joined.

In Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services, petitioner Marlean Ames argued that she was passed over for a new management position for a gay woman. She claims she was then demoted, only to have a gay man hired to do her old job.

A U.S. District Court judge granted summary judgment to her employer, the Ohio Department of Youth Services, because the plaintiff had failed to meet the added requirement several federal circuits had grafted onto the traditional burden-shifting framework for evaluating disparate treatment claims first articulated by the Supreme Court in the landmark case McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green in 1973.

That requirement, part of the prima facie showing a plaintiff must make under the first stage of McDonnell Douglas, requires only certain plaintiffs — those who are white or...

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