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Employment – Race discrimination

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//March 25, 2015//

Employment – Race discrimination

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//March 25, 2015//

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U.S. Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Employment – Race discrimination

Where, during a large scale layoff, an employee who was released had objectively better qualifications that an employee in the same position who was retained, the district court’s grant of summary judgment on the former employee’s race discrimination claim must be reversed.

“A reasonable jury could credit Hutchens’ evidence while rejecting Rivera’s and Cushing’s, and impressed by Hutchens’ credentials, her seniority over Glowacki, her earlier receipt of National Board Certification, her other credentials superior to Glowacki’s, her writing skills, and her toughness in teaching inmates of Cook County Jail year after year, could conclude that she was better qualified for the job than Glowacki. It’s true that having found all these facts in favor of Hutchens, that reasonable jury might nevertheless deem Hutchens a victim not of racism but of error, ineptitude, carelessness, or personal like or dislike, unrelated to race. Certainly the Professional Development Unit seems to have been poorly managed, with little effort at recordkeeping despite the befuddled recollections of key members of the unit; Hutchens may have been a victim of incompetence rather than of racism.”

“But equally (so far as one can judge from a record limited to evidence obtained in pretrial discovery) a reasonable jury might deem Rivera’s and Cushing’s testimony a tissue of lies (the polite term is “pretext”), Hutchens distinctly better qualified for retention than Glowacki (about whom the record contains little information), and the latter’s being retained instead of Hutchens a consequence (for why else all the lies?) of a preference for a person of the same race, by the persons who testified against Hutchens.”

Affirmed in part, and Reversed in part.

13-3648 Hutchens v. Chicago Board of Education

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Chang, J., Posner, J.

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