The Supreme Court on Monday said it supports a lower-court ruling that limited the authority of the Equal Employment Opportunity Employment Commission to subpoena companies for information when it is bringing a case against an employer.
In a 7-1 decision, the justices slapped down the EEOC’s argument that a district court should have backed the EEOC’s effort to fully enforce its request for documents, even after the company argued the request was too broad.
The case, McLane v. EEOC, involved a complaint by a woman who alleged gender discrimination after she was fired by the company. The worker’s job involved manual labor and required a physical exam, which she had failed three times before she was eventually fired.
The EEOC sought extensive information from the employer about the exam and everyone who had taken it. A District Court judge tossed out the subpoena and said the information being sought was not relevant to that woman’s specific case.
The Supreme Court justices backed that lower court decision.
“[T]he decision whether a subpoena is overly burdensome turns on the nature of the materials sought and the difficulty the employer will face in producing them. … [T]hey are the kind of ‘fact-intensive, close calls’ better suited to resolution by the district court than the court of appeals,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who authored the majority opinion.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, and said the district court “erred as a matter of law in demanding that the EEOC show more than relevance in order to gain enforcement of its subpoena.”
The EEOC had not responded to a request for comment as of noon on Monday.
