Patterson v. McLean Credit Union - Significance, Court Reconsiders Whether Section 1981 Prohibits Any Private Discrimination, Patterson Overturned, Civil Rights Act Of 1991

petitioner employment conditions justices

Petitioner

Brenda Patterson

Respondent

McLean Credit Union

Petitioner's Claim

That the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits racial discrimination in the "making and enforcing" of contracts, covers problems arising from conditions of employment, such as harassment and failure to promote.

Chief Lawyers for Petitioner

Julius LeVonne Chambers, Penda D. Hair

Chief Lawyers for Respondent

Roger S. Kaplan, H. Lee Davis, Jr.

Justices for the Court

Harry A. Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy (writing for the Court), Thurgood Marshall, Sandra Day O'Connor, William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, Byron R. White

Justices Dissenting

None

Place

Washington, D.C.

Date of Decision

15 June 1989

Decision

That the Civil Right Act of 1866 does not prohibit racial discrimination in conditions of employment beyond the formation of the employment contract.

Related Cases

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409 (1968).
Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983).

Sources

Naidoff, Caren E.I. "Understanding the Civil Rights Act of 1991," Management Review, April 1992.

Additional Topics

Patterson v. McLean Credit Union - Significance

By taking a narrow reading of the Civil Rights Act, the Court left many minority employees with no redress for harassment and other forms of discrimination in employment. The public and political response to the decision helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which reversed this decision. Immediately following the Civil War, Congress passed a number of laws and constitutional …

Patterson v. McLean Credit Union - Court Reconsiders Whether Section 1981 Prohibits Any Private Discrimination

After hearing oral arguments on the issue of whether section 1981 prohibits on the job harassment, however, Justices Rehnquist, White, O'Connor, Scalia, and Kennedy concluded that the Court should reconsider its earlier decision that section 1981 covers private discrimination. As Charles Fried, U.S. solicitor general at the time, recalled in his book Order and Law: "In the spring of 1988 the civil…

Patterson v. McLean Credit Union - Patterson Overturned

The effect of the Court's decision was profound. Although another civil rights law known as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does prohibit racial harassment by employers, that law applies only to companies with 15 or more employees, leaving over 11 million employees unprotected from racial harassment at the time of the Patterson decision. Following the decision, hundreds of claims of raci…

Patterson v. McLean Credit Union - Civil Rights Act Of 1991

The Civil Rights Act of 1991 amended a number of existing civil rights laws concerned with employment discrimination claims by including provisions for recovery of damages, jury trials, and obtaining relief from on-the-job violations. Previously, only traditional awards of back pay, job reinstatement, and attorney's fees were allowed. Amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Amer…

Citing this material

Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.

Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.