holding that even adverse employment actions motivated by factors strongly correlated with age are not illegal under ADEA
How later courts described this case
- holding that even adverse employment actions motivated by factors strongly correlated with age are not illegal under ADEA
- holding that employer’s reason for adverse action might be unlawful under one statute without violating the anti- discrimination statute at issue; “an employer [does not] violat[e] the ADEA whenever its reason for firing an employee is improper in any respect . . . . For example, it cannot be true that an employer who fires an older black worker because the worker is black thereby violates the ADEA. The employee's race is an improper reason, but it is improper under Title VII, not the ADEA."
- holding "that an employer does not violate the ADEA just by interfering with an older employee’s pension benefits that would have vested by virtue of the employee’s years of service,” but leaving open the possibility of an ADEA violation in "the special case where an employee is about to vest in pension benefits as a result of his age, rather than years of service ... and the employer fires the employee in order to prevent vesting”
- holding that defendant had proffered a “legitimate” nondiscriminatory justification sufficient to satisfy his burden under the second stage of' the McDonnell Douglas/Burdine framework, even though the proffered justification was found to violate another body of law, § 510 of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by Ross Turney v. Beltservice Corporation, a Missouri Corporation, 92 F.3d 1194 (1996)
Turney also argues that Hazen Paper Co. v. Biggins, 507 U.S. 604 (1993) is distinguishable from this case.
The opinion
. Justice Kennedy,
with whom The Chief Justice and Justice Thomas join, concurring.
I agree with the Court that the Court of Appeals placed improper reliance on respondent’s evidence of pension interference and that the standard for determining willfulness announced in Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Thurston, 469 U. S. 111 (1985), applies to individual acts of age discrimination as *618 well as age discrimination manifested in formal, company-wide policy. I write to underscore that the only claim based upon the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), 29 U. S. C. § 621 et seq., asserted by respondent in this litigation is that petitioners discriminated against him because of his age. He has advanced no claim that petitioners’ use of an employment practice that has a disproportionate effect on older workers violates the ADEA. See App. 29-30 (amended complaint); 5 Record 71-76 (jury instructions). As a result, nothing in the Court’s opinion should be read as incorporating in the ADEA context the so-called “disparate impact” theory of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U. S. C. §§2000e to 2000e-17. As the Court acknowledges, ante, at 610, we have not yet addressed the question whether such a claim is cognizable under the ADEA, and there are substantial arguments that it is improper to carry over disparate impact analysis from Title VII to the ADEA. See Markham v. Geller, 451 U. S. 945 (1981) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari); Metz v. Transit Mix, Inc., 828 F. 2d 1202, 1216-1220 (CA7 1987) (Easterbrook, J., dissenting); Note, Age Discrimination and the Disparate Impact Doctrine, 34 Stan. L. Rev. 837 (1982). It is on the understanding that the Court does not reach this issue that I join in its opinion.