U.S. Supreme Court Decides “Me Too” Case

As noted in previous posts, the Supreme Court has an unusual number of employment cases before it this term.  The one it decided today was hyped, but the Court’s decision didn’t deliver on the hype.  Of course, the Court wasn’t hyping it.

“Me too” evidence is testimony by co-workers who weren’t directly involved in a case involving alleged discrimination.  In the case at hand, Ellen Mendelsohn, a 51-year-old manager with Sprint, claimed that the company fired her because of her age during a reduction in force.  In support of her claim, Ms. Mendelsohn tried to introduce testimony from five former employees who claimed they had experienced similar treatment by the company.  The Kansas District Court excluded the testimony because these five former employees didn’t have the same supervisor Ms. Mendelsohn had and, thus, their testimony was irrelevant.  The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed and reversed the District Court’s ruling.

In today’s ruling, the Supreme Court disagreed with the Tenth Circuit.  According to the Court, the Tenth Circuit had no business assessing the relevance of the evidence.  That’s something that a trial court (the District Court in this case) does.  In rendering this decision, the Supreme Court, as it sometimes does, left the matter of “me too” evidence pretty much up in the air.  The Court concluded that this kind of evidence isn’t automatically admissible or inadmissible.  It depends on the facts of each case.

As Ross Runkel observed in his blog, this case (Sprint/United Management v. Mendelsohn) was an evidence case within an employment case, with the Court’s decision turning on the proper role of the trial court vs. the appellate court in ruling on questions of evidence.

Well, darn.  Maybe the next decision will bring more excitement with it.