As it turns out, oral argument in Fort Bend County v. Davis was not the most headline-grabbing Title-VII-related news emanating from the Supreme Court yesterday. Disagreement among the justices seemed relatively muted as they wrestled with whether the requirement that employment discrimination plaintiffs present their claims to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission before filing lawsuits is a jurisdictional prerequisite or merely a claim-processing rule. Raffi Melkonian for respondent (Art Lien) The question matters because claim-processing rules can be waived, unlike jurisdictional rules. Here, Fort Bend County waited five years to argue that Lois Davis did not properly pursue her religious-discrimination claim with the EEOC; during that time, Davis’ case traveled from the district court to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and back again. If Title VII’s administrative-exhaustion requirement is a claim-processing rule, then Fort Bend’s failure-to-exhaust argument came much too late. But if instead the exhaustion requirement is jurisdictional, then it is never too late for a defendant to raise a plaintiff’s failure to comply; in addition, courts would be required to raise potential administrative-exhaustion problems themselves, rather than leaving those issues solely to the parties. Congress is free to impose either jurisdictional requirements or mandatory claim-processing rules, and much of the argument was de Source: Breaking News
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