United States: Supreme Court Addresses Time Limits For Filing Discrimination Charges

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 establishes time limits for filing a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). A claimant ordinarily must file a charge within 180 days "after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred" or the claim is lost. In states that have their own antidiscrimination agencies similar to the EEOC, however, claimants may file their EEOC charges as late as 300 days after the occurrence of the alleged unlawful employment practice. Lessening the effect of these time limits, some lower courts have allowed claimants to recover for discriminatory acts occurring well outside the 180- or 300-day period as long as those acts were sufficiently related to discriminatory acts within the applicable time limit so that the total discriminatory conduct constituted one "continuing violation." In a decision issued on June 10, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court substantially narrowed the concept of "continuing violation" in individual lawsuits, effectively limiting it to claims for "hostile environment" harassment. National Railroad Passenger Corp. v. Morgan.

In the Morgan case, an employee filed an EEOC charge against his employer alleging that throughout his employment he had been subjected to a racially hostile work environment as well as to discriminatory job assignments, disciplinary actions, and denial of the opportunity to participate in an apprenticeship program. Some of the acts occurred within 300 days (the applicable limitations period) of when the employee filed his charge, but many of the acts occurred outside of that time period. Although the employer argued that the allegations of acts falling outside of the 300-day time period were not timely, a lower appellate court applied the continuing violation doctrine and held that the employer could be held liable for all of the claims, even though some fell outside of the 300-day time period. The employer appealed this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court partially rejected the lower appellate court’s use of the continuing violation theory and issued two holdings. First, with regard to discrete discriminatory acts such as the disciplinary actions and job assignments about which the employee had complained, the Court rejected the use of the continuing violation doctrine and held that an employee has up to 180 or 300 days after the day the discrete act occurred to file an EEOC charge challenging the act. If the employee waits beyond the applicable time period to file a charge challenging a discrete act of discrimination, the claim is no longer timely, and the employer cannot be held liable for the discrete act. Second, the Court endorsed the application of the continuing violation doctrine to hostile environment claims and held that a charge alleging a discriminatory hostile work environment is timely as long as at least one act contributing to the hostile environment occurred within the applicable charge-filing period. The Court issued a different holding with regard to hostile environment claims because, by their very nature, those claims deal with the cumulative effect of repeated acts of harassing conduct, no one of which necessarily constitutes unlawful discriminatory conduct standing alone.

In addressing under what circumstances an employer can be held liable for Title VII claims that are not filed within the charge-filing period, the Supreme Court’s decision in Morgan is a mixed result for employers. On the one hand, the decision in Morgan is good for employers, because employees will be barred from recovering damages or other remedies for a discrete act of discrimination unless they file a charge with the EEOC within 180 or 300 days of that particular act. On the other hand, the Court’s limitation of the continuing violation doctrine may lead employees to file multiple charges with the EEOC to preserve the right to recover on all their claims. As a result, employers may have to defend against more EEOC charges. With regard to hostile environment claims, employees may now feel less rushed to file a charge with the EEOC and may be more inclined to pursue remedial action through an employer’s internal complaint-resolution procedures before bringing the EEOC into the picture. However, the application of the continuing violation doctrine to hostile environment claims may sometimes force employers to defend against claims that arose several years in the past. In this situation, an employer may be able to argue that the employee unjustifiably sat on his or her rights to the detriment of the employer.