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Some Supreme Court cases are not difficult because of the legal questions; they are difficult because of the narratives that test them.
Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, in which the Supreme Court correctly struck down a judge-made rule that imposed a higher burden of proof on discrimination plaintiffs from so-called majority groups, is one of those cases. The court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was right to remind us that Title VII speaks to individuals, not demographics. And it was right to do so at a moment when the meaning of civil rights law is being contested from every direction.
The plaintiff in Ames was a straight woman passed over for a promotion in favor of a lesbian colleague and later replaced by a gay man. Courts below applied a special evidentiary hurdle to her claim, because of her status as a heterosexual woman. That rule wasn’t in the statute. It wasn’t in the case law. It was invented to screen out claims that judges instinctively distrust.
This case isn’t about affirmative action, but it sits in its shadow. In recent years, debates over race, equity, and merit have bled across legal contexts, distorting how we talk about discrimination and who the law is meant to protect. Ames presented a different legal question, but it arrived in the midst of a broader backlash—one that treats efforts to correct exclusion as new forms of favoritism and casts civil rights laws as weapons in a zero-sum war over opportunity.
That context matters. The instinct to redraw the boundaries of both the law and its protections—based on who invokes them—is the same.
Decades ago, the Supreme Court justified race-conscious admissions in the language of “diversity,” but the real purpose was always deeper—to reckon with generational denial and to make access real. Two years ago in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, this court undid that work without reckoning with its impacts. The race neutrality that they embraced in that case, in a context built on exclusion, is no neutrality at all.
But Title VII is a different tool. It does not directly allocate future opportunities. It adjudicates harm. It asks whether this person, in this workplace, was treated differently because of a protected trait. And that inquiry must remain universal, not because all forms of discrimination are historically equal—they are not—but because justice must be.
The burdens of proof in discrimination cases should not be calibrated to the identity of the person asserting the claim. The law cannot protect everyone by trusting some a little less.
Let’s also be clear-eyed about what’s happening in the broader political moment. There has been an uptick in people from majority groups bringing discrimination suits not in the pursuit of fairness, but in retaliation against efforts to correct imbalance. We’ve seen DEI offices become scapegoats. We’ve seen white plaintiffs sue because equity initiatives made space for others. We’ve seen straight men, in particular, claim reverse discrimination when the playing field begins to level. These lawsuits are not all brought in good faith.
But acknowledging that disturbing trend does not require us to endorse a doctrine that bends the rules of proof. The solution to bad-faith litigation isn’t to raise the bar for certain plaintiffs. It’s to apply the law faithfully and let the facts fall where they may.
To be sure, Title VII did not emerge from an abstract desire for neutrality. It was a direct response to centuries of racial apartheid in American employment. It was born in the crucible of Jim Crow, a legal attempt to say, finally, that the dignity of Black labor counted. It was passed because Black people were systematically denied work, underpaid when they found it, or degraded while doing it. And those dynamics didn’t vanish. They evolved.
Workplace discrimination today is more cunning than crude. It wears a smile. It hides behind pretext and “fit” and “culture.” It is felt in the silence after a qualified candidate is passed over. It shows up in performance reviews warped by bias that’s hard to document but easy to feel. And it persists in every office where being Black, or Muslim, or trans, or simply different from the power structure means you are always one mistake away from being deemed a “problem.”
This lived experience for millions is also why the heightened burden imposed by the Sixth Circuit in Ames was so dangerous. When courts start building procedural walls for one kind of plaintiff, those same walls are eventually turned against everyone. What begins as a gate for white or straight plaintiffs too often metastasizes into disbelief toward the very people the statute was written to defend.
We’ve seen how this plays out.
In the 2013 case Vance v. Ball State, the Supreme Court rewrote what it meant to be a “supervisor” in workplace harassment cases. The decision ignored the daily reality that power in a workplace isn’t just about who signs the HR forms. It’s about who can make your life hell. The court said that unless the harasser had formal authority to hire, fire, or discipline, the employer wasn’t responsible wasn’t responsible for the harassment. That meant the people who assign your shifts, control your workload, and whisper threats into your everyday—people who hold real, lived power — could terrorize you with impunity. Vance didn’t just raise the bar. It erased the harm. It taught survivors that unless their abuser wore a nametag reading “supervisor,” they were on their own.
The pain was real. The racism was undisputed. And still, the court told Vance: too bad. That’s what happens when the law becomes more interested in neat edges than messy truths.
It is fair to ask why clarity about Title VII’s proper standard arrived here, and not in any number of cases involving marginalized workers who were told their mistreatment was not quite provable enough. But that is not a reason to reject the outcome in Ames. It is a reason to hold the court—and the country—to the very principle it just affirmed: that justice cannot be rationed by identity.
The unanimous opinion of the court, authored by Justice Jackson, is elegant in its simplicity and unflinching in its logic. It begins where all sound statutory interpretation should: with the text. Title VII prohibits discrimination “because of” race, color, religion, sex, including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity, and national origin. It does not carve out different evidentiary burdens depending on the protected characteristics of the plaintiff.
Justice Jackson emphasizes this plainly: “Nothing in the text of Title VII suggests that liability turns on a plaintiff’s status as a member of a historically discriminated-against group.” To hold otherwise, the court explains, would be to create a kind of gatekeeping test for disfavored plaintiffs, one that has no statutory basis and invites judges to speculate about which claims seem plausible before discovery even begins.
It’s meaningful that this opinion is authored by the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. She understands uniquely how bias operates not just in overt acts but in quiet exclusions, procedural hurdles, and systems that withhold belief. Her opinion reminds us that the genius of Title VII is its neutrality in the service of equity: a single standard applied to all, precisely so that courts don’t decide, in advance, who deserves access to the law’s protection.
It would have been easy to treat Ames as another wedge case, a vehicle for resentment dressed up as equal treatment. And some have done just that in their headlines editorializing about the court’s holding. Those headlines also get another thing wrong: there is no such thing as reverse discrimination. That phrase has always been a rhetorical sleight of hand, an attempt to recast equality as a threat and to frame the loss of unearned advantage as injustice. Title VII recognizes no such concept. It prohibits discrimination, full stop. Not some kinds. Not only those that follow predictable hierarchies. But any employment decision made because of race, sex, religion, or other protected traits— regardless of who bears the brunt.
We cannot afford to let headlines distort the holding. Ames does not make it easier for white or straight plaintiffs to win discrimination claims. It makes it equally possible, which is what the law already required. This decision doesn’t open floodgates. It closes a loophole.
It may be tempting, especially in this political moment, to view every civil rights ruling through the lens of gain or loss, progressive or conservative, majority or minority. But sometimes the most important work is simply clearing the debris, removing the judicial inventions that cloud the text, and returning to first principles.
There is no justice in selective gatekeeping. No fairness in burdening people based on who they are rather than what they endured. And no legitimacy in a civil rights framework that makes identity, rather than conduct, the axis of disbelief.
This decision did not expand the law. It honored it. And if we’re wise, we won’t let our fears of bad faith obscure a rare moment of doctrinal clarity.
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