Big Decisions: How Six Supreme Court Cases Could Change Your Life

Photo by C. Sherburne/Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court, set to begin a new term next week, has already agreed to hear cases that could have far-reaching impact on older Americans, from their pension rights to protections in the workplace to their ability to seek redress from harmful products.

“One theme of these cases is the availability of legal remedies to people who have been injured by employment practices or other corporate practices,” says Catherine Fisk, a specialist in employment law and professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.

So far only 47 cases have been accepted for argument—in line with the court’s trend of focusing on fewer and fewer cases—but four of those 47 deal with employment law. The court is closely divided and likely to produce yet more 5-4 decisions, with Judge Anthony M. Kennedy often in the center as swing vote.

Those are also four of the six cases with the most import for Americans age 50 and older, the other two being a health case and a consumer suit. One employment case, Penn Plaza LLC v. Pyett, deals directly with age discrimination. But the other employment cases could also affect claims based on age or disability discrimination, because discrimination laws are interpreted similarly whether the issue is race or age or other factors.

“The impact on older workers of broad interpretation of all employment laws will dramatically impact the remainder of their working lives,” says Stuart Cohen, senior vice president of legal advocacy at AARP Foundation.

In the Penn Plaza case, a group of night watchmen in New York City were working under a union contract when they lost their positions. Their employer, Penn Plaza, hired a different contractor for security work, who allegedly brought in younger workers. The union, which had agreed to Penn Plaza’s request to hire the outside security company, declined to press the case for the night watchmen. The watchmen, the only building employees over age 50, sued for age discrimination.

The legal issue for the Supreme Court is whether the watchmen can file suit claiming their individual rights outside of the union contract were violated under state and federal law. Their union contract requires that workers take complaints to arbitration instead of to court, and Penn Plaza says that the watchment are bound by that contract. But lower courts have ruled that the arbitration requirement, which governs collective issues such as the right to strike, doesn’t apply to individual civil rights to sue for discrimination.

If workers can sue on that basis and they’re able to prove discrimination, they can receive damages. The case could set a precedent for union workers at other companies.

AT&T Corp. v. Hulteen could affect the retirement benefits of women who took time off after childbirth before federal law mandated companies to treat maternity leaves like other disability leaves. In that case, Noreen Hulteen and other AT&T workers argue that they got lower pension benefits than they should have.

Before the 1978 Pregnancy Disability Act, AT&T had a policy that penalized employees who took maternity leaves longer than 30 days by reducing their seniority, on which their pension would later be based. AT&T employees who had babies prior to 1979 have the old policy factored into their seniority–and therefore their pension. For Hulteen, the policy reduced her seniority by about seven months.

AT&T argues that the system was legal at the time and can’t be retroactively made illegal. But a federal appeals court ruled that using the old policy of deducting pregnancy time from seniority as part of a current calculation of pensions violated Hulteen’s civil rights.

A brief filed by a group of large employers told the court that awarding money to Hulteen and the other women in her suit will destabilize the pension system. “ ‘Rewriting history’ by requiring alteration of the factors that determine the size of the pension distributions can put the funding of those plans in grave danger and threatens the benefit security of current and future plan participants and their beneficiaries,” says the brief by the ERISA Industry Committee.

In Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville, the court will decide whether someone who participates in a company investigation is protected from being fired in retaliation. The case is likely to affect not only legal action under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but also age discrimination lawsuits.

Vicky Crawford, a payroll coordinator for more than 30 years, cooperated with the Nashville government’s investigation of sexual harassment charges against a senior executive who oversaw employee relations for the school district. She and two other employees were fired after alleging that the executive had sexually harassed them. Nashville says they were fired for other reasons—in Crawford’s instance, alleged irregularities in the way the payroll was done.

The legal question is whether Crawford is protected by laws against retaliation. The law applies to those who have filed a complaint, such as with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Lower courts said Crawford was not protected by the anti-retaliation laws because she had not yet filed an EEOC complaint when she participated in the internal investigation. The law, they said, is set up for those who actively resist workplace discrimination, not for those who merely respond to an investigation.

Worker advocates say the legal protection is important because it encourages employees in Crawford’s situation to come forward to help clean up problems in the workplace.

The case Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings and Investment Plan deals with an all-too-common paperwork problem. When William and Liv Kennedy divorced in 1994, she signed away her rights to inheriting her ex-husband’s retirement plan. But he never filed paperwork with his company removing her as his beneficiary. Now his ex-wife and his estate (led by their daughter) are fighting over the money.

The court must decide between the state divorce decree (which would leave the money to the estate) or the retirement plan paperwork, which designates the ex-wife and which federal pension law carefully protects.

No matter whether the court rules for state law or federal law, Fisk says, the decision will help companies administering pensions as well as families dealing with complicated paperwork. “What everyone would want is a clear rule,” says Fisk, the Chancellor’s Professor of Law at Irvine.

Lawsuits dealing with drugs and cigarettes also address the sticky issue of dueling federal and state law. Wyeth v. Levine could affect millions of prescription drug users. Guitarist Diana Levine of Marshfield, Vt., filed suit against the makers of a drug, Phenergan, that was given to her to treat nausea from a migraine headache. The medicine was administered by the “IV push” method that pumps it directly into a vein.

The drug was mistakenly injected into an artery and caused so much damage and gangrene that Levine’s hand and forearm were amputated. Levine’s suit claims that the drug should have come with a stronger warning label about the known pitfalls of administering it by that method.

The court must sort out whether she can sue under state law, even though the federal Food and Drug Administration had approved the labeling for the drug. State laws that give patients redress for harm caused by drugs with inadequate labels have never been overturned before. But the Roberts court has recently sided with the federal government over state law in other cases, so court watchers are anxious for the outcome of the case.

Wyeth claimed the suit was invalid because the labeling had already been approved by the federal government’s FDA. It would have been impossible to comply with both the FDA-approved label and a stronger state-approved warning against using the IV push method to administer Phenergan, Wyeth said.

Consumer advocates say the FDA is not up to the job of protecting consumers without the state liability laws also providing protection. They say FDA doesn’t have enough resources or authority in some cases to protect the pubic without help from the states. For instance, the FDA can’t force a drug maker to change a label to reflect new dangers of drugs after they’ve gone on the market.

A disproportionate number of prescription drug users are 50 and older, says Cohen of AARP. If the right to sue under state law is wiped away, “it would have disastrous consequences in terms of protecting people from harmful drugs.”

Another case, Altria Group v. Good, also deals with federal regulation that conflicts with state law. Marlboro Light smoker Stephanie Good and other smokers from Maine accused Marlboro’s maker of deceiving them in marketing the cigarettes as “light” and better than regular cigarettes. About 80 percent of America’s 45 million smokers opt for light cigarettes. But Good and the other plaintiffs said the manufacturer knew—and concealed the fact—that light cigarettes are not less harmful. She filed suit under state law claiming the company had deceived consumers.

The district court said her claims under state law were preempted by federal rules on cigarette labeling, but an appeals court disagreed. Philip Morris also argued that the Federal Trade Commission authorized the use of the word “light” for its cigarettes.

The court decision could affect other products as it sets a precedent on whether manufacturers are exempt from state consumer protection laws if their product is federally regulated.

That case is at the top of the court’s docket: It will be heard Oct. 6—the first day of the court term.

Tamara Lytle was Washington bureau chief and correspondent for the Orlando Sentinel from 1997 to 2008.