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Contribution to Book
Retaliation
Faculty Scholarship
  • Rebecca Hanner White
  • Michael Z. Green, Texas A&M University School of Law
Document Type
Book Section
Publication Date
10-2020
ISBN
9781108717403
DOI
10.1017/9781108694643.009
Abstract

Chapter 8 rewrites Clark County School District v. Breeden, which held that the plaintiff’s retaliation claim under Title VII failed because no reasonable person could believe that a single incident of harassment violated Title VII. The rewritten opinion, exposing the bias many women suffer in the workplace as a result of micro-aggressions and using the perspective of a reasonable person in the plaintiff’s shoes, holds that complaining about even a single incident of harassment is sufficient to constitute a reasonable belief that the plaintiff is experiencing harassment. The rewritten opinion also broadens the causation element in retaliation cases in two ways. First, it refuses to set a bright-line rule for the passage of time between the protected activity and the adverse employment action. Second, it allows mixed-motive causation rather than but-for causation, which would make retaliation claims easier to win and would have eliminated the Nassar case, where the Court held that plaintiffs had to prove that retaliation was the but-for cause of the adverse employment action.

Num Pages
24
Series Title
Feminist Judgment Series: Rewritten Judicial Opinions
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Editor
Ann C. McGinley & Nicole Buonocore Porter
Book Title
Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Employment Discrimination Opinions
Citation Information
Rebecca Hanner White and Michael Z. Green. "Retaliation" (2020) p. 462 - 485
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/michael_z_green/188/