Raytheon Co. v. Hernandez
The Supreme Court ruled that a federal appeals court wrongly used a disparate-impact style analysis to decide a disability-discrimination case that was only about intentional treatment, and sent the case back for a proper review.
The Court did not decide whether the ADA actually gives recovering drug addicts a right to be rehired despite a neutral no-rehire policy; it only held that the lower court used the wrong legal framework to get there, leaving that broader question unresolved.
“Maintaining a blanket policy against rehire of all former employees who violated company policy not only screens out persons with a record of addiction who have been successfully rehabilitated”
Quoting the appeals court's reasoning that the Supreme Court found improperly mixed disparate-impact concepts into a disparate-treatment case.
How it got here: A trial court granted summary judgment against the employee's discrimination claim, but the Ninth Circuit reversed; the employer asked the Supreme Court to review that reversal.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Joel Hernandez worked for Hughes Missile Systems for 25 years until he tested positive for cocaine and was forced to resign under the company's conduct rules. Over two years later, after attending Alcoholics Anonymous and getting sober, he applied to be rehired. A company employee reviewed his file, saw he had been fired for misconduct, and rejected his application under the company's policy against rehiring employees terminated for rule violations.
The question before the Court
If a company has a neutral policy against rehiring anyone fired for breaking workplace conduct rules, can that policy still count as illegal disability discrimination just because it happens to keep out recovering drug addicts?
Why it matters
Employers with neutral rules against rehiring anyone fired for misconduct can keep relying on those rules as a legitimate reason for not rehiring someone, even if the past misconduct was tied to a disability like addiction — as long as the decision wasn't actually motivated by the disability itself. Workers pursuing ADA claims must clearly choose and timely raise the right legal theory, since courts can't blend disparate-impact reasoning into a disparate-treatment case.
What changes now
The case goes back to the Court of Appeals to apply the correct disparate-treatment framework: deciding whether there is enough evidence that the company's stated reason — its neutral no-rehire policy — was really just a cover for discriminating against the employee because of his past drug addiction. The Supreme Court did not resolve whether the employee will ultimately win, and it did not address the disparate-impact theory, which he had raised too late to pursue.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the ADA gives recovering drug addicts a right to be rehired despite a lawful, neutral no-rehire policy, and it expressly did not reach the disparate-impact question the case had originally been granted to address, since that claim had not been timely raised below.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court distinguished two very different ways a policy can be unlawfully discriminatory: disparate treatment, where the employer's decision is actually motivated by a protected trait like disability, and disparate impact, where a neutral policy applied to everyone still falls more harshly on a protected group and can't be justified by business necessity.
- Because the employee had only pursued a disparate-treatment claim in a timely way — not a disparate-impact claim, which he raised too late — the case had to be analyzed solely under the framework for intentional discrimination, using the burden-shifting approach from a 1973 case (McDonnell Douglas) for proving discriminatory intent through circumstantial evidence.
- Under that framework, once the employee shows basic facts suggesting discrimination, the employer only needs to offer some legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for its decision; the Court explained that a neutral, generally-applied policy against rehiring anyone fired for workplace misconduct is exactly that kind of legitimate reason, regardless of whether the earlier misconduct happened to relate to a disability.
- The appeals court instead asked whether the policy screened out a disproportionate number of recovering addicts and whether the company had a business-necessity justification — questions that belong only to disparate-impact analysis, not to deciding whether an employer's stated reason counts as legitimate in a disparate-treatment case.
- By importing disparate-impact concepts into a disparate-treatment claim, the appeals court effectively ruled that this kind of neutral policy could never be a legitimate reason in a drug-addiction case, which skipped over the real remaining question: whether there was enough evidence that the employer's stated reason was actually just a pretext for discriminating based on disability.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green (411 U.S. 792)
The Court relied on this case's burden-shifting approach as the correct framework for disparate-treatment claims.