When Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it failed to address how a plaintiff is required to prove employment discrimination in the absence of direct evidence. Since then, a series of tests have evolved articulating how a plaintiff can defeat a defendant-employer’s motion for summary judgment relying on circumstantial evidence. The most famous of these is the McDonnell Douglas framework, referring to the burden-shifting test articulated by the Supreme Court in McDonnell Douglas v. Green, 411 U.S. 92 (1973). In that case, the Supreme Court held that, in a private, non-class action alleging discrimination under Title VII, the complainant has the burden of establishing a prima facie case, i.e., that (i) they belong to a protected class; (ii) they were qualified for the position they held or sought; (iii) though qualified, they were rejected or suffered another adverse employment action; and (iv) the employer sought candidates with complainant’s qualifications or replaced them with a person outside their protected class. Once the complainant has satisfied their prima facie burden, the burden of production shifts to the employer to advance a legitimate, non-discriminatory explanation for the challenged employment action. If it does so, the burden returns to the complainant to establish that the employer’s explanation is pretextual, meaning that it is false and that discrimination was the real reason for the adverse action.
For more than fifty years, the...
This Alert provides a summary and takeaways from the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recent announcement of False Claims Act (FCA) recoveries for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025. FY 2025 saw record-breakin...