On June 5, 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously held in Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services that all plaintiffs, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, must satisfy the same proof requirements to meet their initial burden of establishing an employment discrimination claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That initial burden requires only that a plaintiff show that she applied for a position for which she was qualified and was rejected “under circumstances which give rise to an inference of unlawful discrimination.” The Court concluded that the plaintiff in this case, a straight woman, was unlawfully burdened by the Sixth Circuit’s additional requirement that “majority-group” plaintiffs provide more evidentiary support than “minority-group” plaintiffs to raise an initial inference of discrimination.
The Ames decision applies the legal framework mentioned above, which the Court first outlined in McDonnell Douglas v. Green. This framework is used in most jurisdictions for proving all intentional discrimination claims in the absence of direct evidence of discrimination. In Ames, the Court limited its holding to a rejection of the extra burden the Sixth Circuit and four other federal Courts of Appeals had imposed on a subset of “majority-group” plaintiffs. Although the Court’s decision is not surprising, many employment lawyers have been especially interested in it. In Justice Thomas’s concurrence, joined by Justice Gorsuch, he suggests the...
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