Court upholds right to family leave

Tuesday, May 27, 2003 | 11:18 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court, ruling on a Nevada case, today upheld the right of state workers to get time off to care for children or ailing relatives, rejecting an attempt to scale back a law guaranteeing 12 weeks of family leave.

The 6-3 ruling is a departure from the court's line of cases that expanded state rights. The court majority concluded that Congress was within its rights to mandate that states give workers the same benefits that the federal Family and Medical Leave Act grants to private-sector employees.

In a ruling against Nevada and in favor of former state employee William Hibbs, the court majority said state employees can sue in federal court to enforce their rights under the 1993 law. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote the opinion for himself and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Justice John Paul Stevens also agreed with the outcome.

"You could have knocked me over with a feather," said Treva Hearne, one of Hibbs' attorneys.

Hearne said the ruling paves the way for Hibbs to have his case heard in federal court. Hibbs was unavailable for comment today, but Hearne said he was ecstatic with the news.

"So many people said we were tilting at windmills, but we prevailed, we have done it, and (Hibbs) is so pleased," Hearne said.

Hearne called the case a victory for all state employees and Congress' power to protect workers.

Congress had ample and persuasive evidence that women state employees, similar to women in the private sector, suffered in the workplace when work and family commitments clashed, the court concluded.

"By creating an across-the-board, routine employment benefit for all eligible employees, Congress sought to ensure that family care leave would no longer be stigmatized as an inordinate drain on the workplace caused by female employees and that employers could not evade leave obligations simply by hiring men," Rehnquist wrote for the majority.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas dissented.

In other court action today:

But Oliverio Martinez may still be allowed to collect damages on grounds that his constitutional due process rights were violated by the 1997 hospital room questioning, the court said in sending the case back to California for more consideration.

In the Nevada case, Scalia wrote that by relying on evidence that states governments in general had discriminated against their women employees, the court majority treats the states as a monolith.

"Today's opinion does not even attempt to demonstrate that each one of the 50 states ... was in violation," of the Constitution's guarantee of equal treatment, he wrote.

"It treats the states as some sort of collective entity which is guilty or innocent as a body."

In passing the Family and Medical Leave Act, Congress said it was acting in part to stop discrimination against both women and men. Women had suffered discrimination in hiring and promotions because of assumptions they would shoulder most of the care for children or sick family, and men had suffered discrimination because they were presumed not to need time off to perform the same care, Congress reasoned.

The court weighed that rationale against state governments' usual immunity from individuals' federal lawsuits. Congress can override that immunity in limited circumstances, and Nevada argued that Hibbs was not one of them.

The case began as a straightforward claim that Hibbs deserved time off from his job with the Nevada welfare office to care for his ailing wife.

Hibbs wanted to sue the state to enforce his right to family leave, but Nevada claimed it was immune from Hibbs' lawsuit under the Constitution's guarantee of state sovereignty.

In a series of previous cases, a narrow 5-4 majority ruled that Congress overstepped its authority in passing various civil rights and safety laws.

Taken together, the states' rights cases are considered the hallmark of the court's increasingly conservative bent under Rehnquist. It is noteworthy, then, that Rehnquist departed from that line of cases today.

Cornelia Pillard, a Georgetown University law professor who argued for Hibbs, said the ruling was a signal that the courts recognize the extent of sexual discrimination in the workplace.

"It's persistent and it's pervasive and the court appreciates that," Pillard said. "The court concluded that there is a long history of employees experiencing this kind of discrimination."

Paul Taggert, formerly of the Nevada attorney general's office, who argued the case, said the Family Leave Act was not designed by Congress to be used as a remedy by disgruntled employees in gender discrimination cases. He had argued that the act was merely a leave benefit law.

Taggert noted that most states already have effective family and medical leave laws that protect all workers, so he said the case was never about protecting workers.

"I don't know that this was necessarily a victory for state employees," Taggert, who is in private practice, said today. "It has more to do with the power of the 11th and 14th amendments."

The Family Leave Act applies to all workers except those employed by very small businesses. That included the nearly 5 million people employed by state governments and the many million more who work for private companies.

The National Women's Law Center, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief, this morning called the ruling a "victory for workers everywhere."

Sun reporters

Benjamin Grove and Cy Ryan contributed to this story.