Opinion ID: 523563
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Bazemore Claim

Text: 44 In Bazemore v. Friday, 478 U.S. 385, 106 S.Ct. 3000, 92 L.Ed.2d 315 (1986), the Supreme Court held that employers have an obligation to eradicate employment discrimination that began prior to the effective date of Title VII (1972), if the discrimination continues into the post-1972 liability period. Id. at 397, 106 S.Ct. at 3007. The Supreme Court also stated that statistical evidence of pre-Act discrimination can be probative of ongoing, post-Act discrimination. Id. at 402, 106 S.Ct. at 3010. 45 On appeal, appellants contend that the district court erroneously excluded evidence of pre-Act discrimination in violation of the Supreme Court's dictates in Bazemore. In particular, appellants claim that the district judge improperly excluded Exhibit 990, which purported to document statistically significant evidence of discrimination as to initial faculty rank. This claim is without merit, however. At trial, the defendants objected to the admission of Exhibit 990 not because it was offered to prove pre-Act discrimination, but because it was unreliable and incomplete. While the weakness of statistical evidence should not ordinarily preclude its admission, see Bazemore, 478 U.S. at 400, 106 S.Ct. at 3009, the Supreme Court has recognized that some statistical evidence may be so unreliable as to be irrelevant, see id. at 400 n. 10, 106 S.Ct. at 3009 n. 10; see also Penk v. Oregon State Bd. of Higher Educ., 816 F.2d 458, 465 (9th Cir.) (Bazemore ... does not give blanket approval to the introduction of all evidence derived from multiple regression analyses.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 108 S.Ct. 158, 98 L.Ed.2d 113 (1987). Apparently the district judge herein thought that to be the case with respect to this particular exhibit, because she sustained the defendants' objection to its admission on the grounds that it was irrelevant and unduly confusing. Upon review of the record, we do not find the district court's decision to exclude the study to be clearly erroneous, and therefore we affirm the evidentiary ruling. 46 Moreover, we note that appellant's reliance on this court's decision in Sobel v. Yeshiva University as support for their more generalized, Bazemore -type claims is misplaced. In Sobel, the plaintiffs introduced evidence specifically designed to prove that women were discriminated against prior to the effective date of Title VII, and argued that Yeshiva had a legal obligation to equalize women's salaries immediately upon application of Title VII to universities. 839 F.2d at 27. In the present case, even though the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bazemore the same month that plaintiffs' trial was commenced, the plaintiffs did not introduce any statistical evidence of substance to prove that there was discrimination at New Paltz prior to the effective date of Title VII. Instead, nearly all of the plaintiffs' studies focused on the class liability period, which covered the years 1973 to 1984. This is in marked contrast to Sobel and Bazemore, wherein the plaintiffs offered direct, independent proof of pre-Act discrimination. See Bazemore, 478 U.S. at 401, 106 S.Ct. at 3009; Sobel, 839 F.2d at 30. Accordingly, we find appellants' arguments on this point generally to be without merit.