Gomez-Perez v. Potter
The Court ruled that the federal-employee age discrimination law's ban on "discrimination based on age" also covers retaliation against workers who complain about age bias, even though the law never uses the word "retaliation."
The decision lets a Puerto Rico postal worker pursue her retaliation claim after her supervisor allegedly cut her hours and let false harassment accusations circulate following her age-discrimination complaint, and it extends to age-bias cases a pattern the Court had already applied to race and sex discrimination laws.
“Retaliation for Jackson’s advocacy of the rights of the girls’ basketball team in this case is ‘discrimination’ ‘on the basis of sex,’ just as retaliation for advocacy on behalf of a black lessee in Sullivan was discrimination on the basis of race.”
The majority explains why retaliation counts as a form of discrimination under similarly worded laws.
How it got here: A federal district court granted the Postal Service summary judgment; the First Circuit affirmed, ruling the law's ban on age "discrimination" doesn't cover retaliation, splitting from the D.C. Circuit.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Myrna Gómez-Pérez, a 45-year-old postal clerk in Puerto Rico, requested a transfer back to her old job after a prior transfer didn't work out, but her supervisor gave the job to someone else. After she filed an internal age-discrimination complaint, she says she faced retaliation: hostile meetings, false harassment accusations, and drastically cut work hours. She sued the Postal Service under the federal-sector age discrimination law.
The question before the Court
Can a federal postal worker sue for retaliation after complaining about age discrimination, even though the federal-employee age discrimination law doesn't mention retaliation by name?
Why it matters
Federal employees who face payback for reporting age discrimination now have a clear path to sue in federal court, not just an internal administrative complaint process. Federal agencies must treat retaliation claims by older workers the same way they treat outright age-discrimination claims, increasing their potential exposure to lawsuits and damages.
What changes now
The case returns to the lower courts, where Gómez-Pérez can now pursue her retaliation claim on the merits under the federal-sector age discrimination law. This is a final merits ruling on the legal question of whether the law covers retaliation at all; it does not decide whether her specific allegations actually amount to unlawful retaliation, which remains for further proceedings.
What this does not decide
The Court decided only that the federal-employee age-discrimination law's ban on "discrimination based on age" covers retaliation claims. It did not decide whether the worker's specific allegations prove retaliation occurred, and it expressly left open whether the similarly worded federal-sector provision of Title VII (covering race, sex, and other bias) also covers retaliation.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Roberts
“But it cannot be—contrary to the majority’s apparent view—that any time Congress proscribes “discrimination based on X,” it means to proscribe retaliation as well.”The dissent's core objection to reading every discrimination ban as automatically covering retaliation.
Chief Justice Roberts argued that a broad ban on "discrimination" does not automatically include retaliation, pointing out that the private-sector version of the same law separately and explicitly bans both discrimination and retaliation, which would be pointless if discrimination already included retaliation. He argued Congress deliberately left federal employees' retaliation claims to the existing civil service administrative process instead of a lawsuit.
Dissent — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, wrote separately to reiterate his view that the Jackson precedent wrongly blurred the line between discrimination and retaliation. He maintained that retaliation is conceptually not the same as discrimination "based on age," and would have affirmed the lower court's ruling against the worker.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court looked to two earlier decisions reading similarly broad antidiscrimination language to also forbid retaliation: Sullivan v. Little Hunting Park, which read a law banning race discrimination in property sales to also protect someone punished for helping a Black renter, and Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education, which read Title IX's ban on sex "discrimination" to cover a coach fired for reporting sex bias.
- Because the age-discrimination law's phrase "discrimination based on age" is essentially the same kind of broad, general language used in those two laws, and appears in the same kind of remedial context, the Court treated the reasoning of Sullivan and Jackson as controlling here too.
- The Court rejected the lower court's attempts to distinguish those precedents: whether a law expressly creates a right to sue doesn't change what conduct the underlying ban on "discrimination" reaches, and the importance of third-party reporting in Title IX cases didn't drive the earlier holding, so neither reason justified reading the age-discrimination law more narrowly.
- The Court also rejected the government's argument that Congress's silence on retaliation in the federal-sector age law—unlike a separate provision explicitly banning retaliation for private employers—showed an intent to exclude retaliation claims, noting the two provisions were written years apart in very different terms, so no such inference could be drawn.
- Finally, the Court held that the law's separate provision waiving the government's sovereign immunity for lawsuits already satisfied the strict-construction rule for such waivers, so that rule did not require reading the substantive ban on "discrimination" itself narrowly to exclude retaliation.
- Applying this reasoning, the Court concluded that retaliation against a federal employee for complaining about age discrimination is itself a form of "discrimination based on age" within the meaning of the statute.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Sullivan v. Little Hunting Park, Inc. (396 U. S. 229)
The Court relies on Sullivan's reasoning that a broad discrimination ban also bars retaliation, applying it to the age-discrimination law.
Reaffirms Jackson v. Birmingham Bd. of Ed. (544 U. S. 167)
The Court follows Jackson's holding that Title IX's discrimination ban covers retaliation, extending the same logic to age discrimination.