Piscataway Township Board of Education v. Taxman

The court of appeals defined the issue in simple terms: to decide "whether Title VII permits an employer with a racially balanced work force to grant a non-remedial racial preference in order to promote racial diversity." In other words, they asked whether the Piscataway Board of Education could employ racial hiring preferences even in a case where it was not addressing a past wrong, i.e. discrimination against African Americans in hiring. In boiling down the issue to that question, the court first had to establish that the dismissal of Taxman did not have any remedial basis. It did so in short order, declaring upon a review of the evidence that "black teachers were neither underrepresented nor underutilized in the Piscataway School District work force." In fact, statistics cited by the court showed that the percentage of African American teachers exceeded the percentage of African Americans in the available work force. Thus "the Board's sole purpose in applying its affirmative action policy in this case was to obtain an educational benefit which it believed would result from a racially diverse faculty," Judge Mansmann wrote in his majority opinion.

While lauding this goal in theory, Mansmann found that the board's policy, "devoid of goals and standards, is governed entirely by the Board's whim, leaving the Board free, if it so chooses, to grant racial preferences that do not promote even the policy's claimed purpose. Indeed, under the terms of this policy, the board, in pursuit of a racially diverse work force, could use affirmative action to discriminate against those whom Title VII was enacted to protect. Such a policy unnecessarily trammels the interests of nonminority employees." Accordingly, the court of appeals affirmed the judgment of the district court and awarded back pay to Taxman. It did not, however, grant her claim to punitive damages, because in the court's view, the board had not acted "willfully, wantonly, or outrageously" in this matter.