Emory Law Students Ask Supreme Court to Apply Title VII to Federal Judiciary Employees

U.S. Supreme Court to review the internal system federal courts use to handle workplace complaints from their own employees. The students argue that the judiciary's self-policing structure leaves roughly 30,000 workers without the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Title VII bars workplace harassment and discrimination, and Congress extended those rules to legislative-branch staff by 1995. Sofia Bettini, a recent Emory graduate who helped draft the petition, said clerks and other court employees often do not realize they are giving up standard civil-rights safeguards when they accept judicial-branch jobs.

"You may not know as a student entering a clerkship that you're going to forgo certain workplace protections that you otherwise would never have to even consider forgoing because they just seem that fundamental," Bettini said.

Nine other students joined Bettini in preparing the filing through Emory's Supreme Court Advocacy Program. The students are supporting Caryn Strickland, a former federal public defender who says she experienced sexual harassment while working in the courts. Andrew Taramykin, entering his third year at Emory Law, researched Title VII for the petition.

"Title VII goes back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it prohibits certain unlawful workplace conduct that includes what we generally understand as workplace harassment, workplace discrimination," Taramykin said. Each federal circuit court maintains its own human-resources procedures, which typically assign judges to review complaints involving colleagues they work with daily.

The students contend this arrangement does not provide the neutral decision-maker required by civil-rights law.