[17-587] Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido

Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido

Justia (with opinion) · Docket · oyez.org

Argued on Oct 1, 2018.
Decided on Nov 6, 2018.

Petitioner: Mount Lemmon Fire District.
Respondent: John Guido, et al..

Advocates:

• E. Joshua Rosenkranz (for petitioner)
• Jeffrey L. Fisher (for respondents)
• Jonathan C. Bond (Assistant to the Solicitor General, US Department of Justice, for the United States as amicus curiae supporting respondents)

Facts of the case (from oyez.org)

In 2000, John Guido and Dennis Rankin were hired by the Mount Lemmon Fire District, a political subdivision of the State of Arizona. They were full-time firefighter captains, and at ages 46 and 54, respectively, were the two oldest full-time employees at the Fire District when they were terminated in 2009. Guido and Rankin filed age discrimination charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which found reasonable cause to believe that the Fire District had violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), 29 U.S.C. §§ 621-34. Guido and Rankin subsequently filed suit against the Fire District.

The Fire District sought summary judgment on the basis that it was not an “employer” within the meaning of the ADEA, and the district court agreed. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit reversed. Ruling counter to what other circuits have concluded, the appellate court stated that a political subdivision of a state does not need to have 20 or more employees, as private sector employers do, in order to be covered by the ADEA. 

Question

Under the ADEA, does the same twenty-employee minimum that applies to private employers also apply to political subdivisions of a state, as the Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Tenth Circuits have held, or does the ADEA apply instead to all state political subdivisions of any size, as the Ninth Circuit held in this case?

Conclusion

In a unanimous (8–0) opinion authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court held that the ADEA applies to all state political subdivisions, regardless of the number of employees.  The Court first looked to the plain language of the statute, finding the two-sentence delineation in the definitional provision § 630(b), coupled with the expression “also means” at the start of §630(b)’s second sentence, establish two separate categories: persons engaged in an industry affecting commerce with 20 or more employees; and states or political subdivisions. The latter category has no numerosity limitation. For this reason, the Court found that Mount Lemmon Fire District was subject to the ADEA despite the number of full-time employees there.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.