U.S. justices weigh pregnancy bias case against Fulton DA’s office
U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared torn Monday when considering if the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office correctly defeated a pregnancy bias lawsuit filed by a fired staffer who’s now claiming the office waited too long to make its winning argument.
The justices are considering the attempt by Jasmine Younge to revive her suit against the office, alleging she was unlawfully fired in July 2019 by then-District Attorney Paul Howard. Younge claimed Howard fired her about two months into her job as his deputy chief of staff and director of policy and programs because she was pregnant, in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
The DA’s office beat the case in 2023 when a federal judge in Atlanta agreed with its argument that Younge wasn’t entitled to protections under the Civil Rights Act because she was a member of Howard’s personal staff. Such employees of elected officials must bring job discrimination claims differently, to be decided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Last year, the federal appeals court for Georgia, Florida and Alabama, known as the 11th Circuit, upheld the judge’s decision to end Younge’s case.
Younge is now trying to persuade the Supreme Court that the DA’s office can’t defeat her case that way because it failed to follow procedural rules for federal courts. She said the office didn’t raise the personal staff argument when it first sought to dismiss her complaint in 2020 or when it formally filed more than a dozen defenses to her claims in 2021. And she said it failed in 2022 to get the court’s permission to raise the key defense late.
Several of the justices seemed divided Monday, with some showing support for Younge’s appeal while others questioned how she was prejudiced by the way in which the DA’s office raised the personal staff defense.
Justice Elena Kagan was critical of the argument by the DA’s office that any deviation it may have taken from the relevant procedural rules doesn’t matter because the “overwhelming evidence” since the beginning of the case is that Younge was a member of Howard’s personal staff and therefore exempt from Civil Rights Act protections.
“The point of the fact is that your standard is not the rules standard,” Kagan said to the office’s attorney, Stephen Petrany. “The rules provide standards here. Why not just use them, whether they’re more strict or less strict than the ones that would suit your client?”
Petrany pushed back on the notion that what the DA’s office did was in conflict with court rules. He said Younge misunderstands the rules and that the Atlanta judge was right to toss her case because she wasn’t prejudiced by the way it was litigated. Petrany added that Younge’s suggested procedure would amount to “empty paper shuffling.”
“The rules, to anthropomorphize them, are OK with the idea that in rare circumstances something’s not going to be in the pleadings but you can still raise it,” he said.
Justice Clarence Thomas said he “didn’t quite understand” how Younge was harmed by the timing of the personal staff defense. In response, Petrany said that’s what makes the case “relatively easy.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that Younge may have saved time and money litigating the case if she’d known before 2022 that the DA’s office planned to use the personal staff defense.
“It’s very hard in the aftermath to figure out the extent to which the road not taken affected your case,” she said to Younge’s attorney, Eric Schnapper.
Jackson said the argument by the DA’s office would appear to disincentivize litigants from following procedure. She cited how some courts had applied the relevant rules in different cases and asked Petrany why that’s not how the system should work.
“To the extent you have a different standard, it seems odd,” she said.
Petrany said Younge had argued from the beginning that she wasn’t a member of Howard’s personal staff, indicating she wouldn’t have conceded the case if the DA’s office had raised that defense earlier.
Schnapper told the justices they can easily decide the case in her favor by following the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
“Ruling for us would simply apply the established rules and standards,” he said. “It would not require the court to become embroiled in fashioning new standards.”
The court is expected to decide the case before its current term ends in early July 2027.