Personnel Administrator of Mass. v. Feeney
The Supreme Court upheld Massachusetts' veterans' hiring preference law for state civil service jobs, ruling that even though the law overwhelmingly favored men in practice, it did not violate the Constitution's equal protection guarantee because it was not created or kept in place to discriminate against women.
The decision makes clear that a facially neutral law with severe, foreseeable, gender-skewed effects still is not unconstitutional unless the government adopted it at least partly because of those effects on women, not merely in spite of them.
“It implies that the decisionmaker, in this case a state legislature, selected or reaffirmed a particular course of action at least in part "because of," not merely "in spite of," its adverse effects upon an identifiable group.”
The Court's definition of the discriminatory purpose required to prove unconstitutional gender discrimination.
How it got here: A three-judge federal district court twice struck down the law as unconstitutional; Massachusetts twice appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which first remanded for reconsideration under Washington v. Davis before taking up this second appeal.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Helen Feeney, a longtime Massachusetts state employee, repeatedly scored near the top on civil service exams but lost out on promotions because state law required any qualifying veteran to be ranked ahead of nonveterans, regardless of test scores. Because over 98% of Massachusetts veterans were men, this "absolute lifetime" preference effectively shut women out of many of the state's best civil service jobs, including ones Feeney sought.
The question before the Court
Did Massachusetts' law giving veterans an absolute lifetime hiring edge over other job applicants unlawfully discriminate against women, since almost all veterans were men?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that Massachusetts' veterans' hiring preference did not violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection, even though it drastically limited women's access to top civil service jobs. The law was written and applied to help veterans as a group, not to disadvantage women, and the class it favored -- veterans -- had always been legally open to women, even though very few women had managed to become veterans.
To win, Helen Feeney needed to show Massachusetts adopted or kept the law because of its effect on women, not merely because lawmakers foresaw that effect. The Court found nothing in the law's history showing an intent to exclude women from these jobs, so the severe, foreseeable impact on women's employment opportunities was not, by itself, enough to prove unconstitutional discrimination.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
The ruling let Massachusetts and other states keep giving veterans a strong edge in government hiring, even though the preference overwhelmingly benefited men because so few women had been allowed to serve in the military. It also set a demanding standard for proving sex-discrimination claims against neutral laws, requiring proof the government acted because of a law's effect on women, not just that it foresaw that effect.
What changes now
This is a final decision on the merits. The Massachusetts veterans' preference law remains in effect, and the case returns to the district court for further proceedings consistent with the ruling that the law is constitutional. The decision also cemented the legal framework -- requiring proof of intentional discrimination, not just disparate impact -- that courts use when neutral laws produce severe gender-skewed effects.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the military and federal policies that kept most women from becoming veterans were themselves lawful, and it did not hold that all veterans' preferences are automatically constitutional -- only that this law's severe effects on women were not shown to be intentional discrimination.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Stevens
Justice Stevens agreed with the outcome but questioned whether the majority's two supposedly distinct questions -- whether the classification is covertly gender-based, and whether its effects reflect invidious discrimination -- are actually different questions at all. He found the answer largely in the numbers: about 1,867,000 men were disadvantaged by the preference, a figure close enough to the 2,954,000 disadvantaged women to refute any claim the law was meant to benefit men as a class over women as a class.
Dissent — Justice Marshall
“That a legislature seeks to advantage one group does not, as a matter of logic or of common sense, exclude the possibility that it also intends to disadvantage another.”Marshall's central objection to the majority's reasoning about legislative intent.
Justice Marshall argued the majority's logic was flawed: wanting to benefit veterans does not exclude also intending to disadvantage women, since legislatures often act for multiple reasons at once. He pointed to the statute's history -- including a decades-long exemption protecting 'women's requisitions' jobs -- as evidence of purposeful discrimination, and argued that even if not discriminatory, the law failed heightened scrutiny because far less discriminatory alternatives, like point preferences or time-limited preferences, were readily available.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the two-step framework from Washington v. Davis and Arlington Heights for facially neutral laws with disproportionate effects: first ask whether the law is secretly a disguised classification based on the protected trait, and if not, whether its unequal impact stems from an intent to discriminate rather than merely from unequal results.
- The Court found the veterans' preference was genuinely neutral in both text and design: the statutory definition of 'veteran' had always included women, and the disadvantaged group -- nonveterans -- included large numbers of men too, undercutting any claim the law was really a hidden way to exclude women.
- Having found no disguised gender classification, the Court then asked whether Massachusetts intended the law's severe, foreseeable impact on women, explaining that 'discriminatory purpose' requires more than simply being aware that a policy will produce lopsided effects on a group.
- The Court held that discriminatory purpose means a legislature chose or kept a policy at least in part 'because of,' not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects on an identifiable group, and found nothing in the statute's decades-long history showing lawmakers wanted to keep women out of these jobs.
- Applying that standard, the Court concluded the law's harsh effect on women's employment opportunities, however severe and predictable, was an incidental byproduct of a legitimate preference for military veterans rather than evidence of an intent to discriminate against women.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Washington v. Davis (426 U.S. 229)
The Court relied on this case's rule that a neutral law's disproportionate racial impact alone does not violate equal protection without discriminatory intent, applying it to sex discrimination.
Reaffirms Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp. (429 U.S. 252)
The Court used this case's framework for detecting discriminatory purpose behind facially neutral government decisions.