Court Opinion

ID: 9426163
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:00.815734+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:59.318436
License: Public Domain

*440Mr. Justice Marshall,
concurring.
I agree with the opinion of the Court. I write today only to make the following observations about the proceedings in the District Court on remand relative to the backpay issue.
As the Court affirms, there is no legal bar to raising a claim for backpay under Title VII at any time in the proceedings, even “indeed after a trial on [the] complaint [for injunctive relief] has been had.” Ante, at 424. Furthermore, only the most unusual circumstances would constitute an equitable barrier to the award of make-whole relief where liability is otherwise established. The bar of laches, predicated on the prejudice to a defendant’s case from the tardy entry of a prayer for compensation, should be particularly difficult to establish.
Backpay in Title VII cases is generally computed, with respect to each affected employee or group of employees, by determining the amount of compensation lost as a direct result of the employer’s discriminatory decision not to hire or promote. In litigation such as this, where the plaintiff class is limited to present and former employees of petitioner company who were denied promotions into the more lucrative positions because of their race, there is no need to make additional findings and offsetting computations for wages earned in alternative employment during the relevant period.
The information needed in order to compute backpay for nonpromotion is contained in the personnel records and pay schedules normally maintained by an employer, some under compulsion of law. These data include the time at which an employee in the favored group was promoted over an otherwise more senior member of the disfavored class, and the wage differential that the promotion entailed. Rarely, if ever, could an employer plausibly invoke the doctrine of laches on the usual *441ground that the passage of time has put beyond reach evidence or testimony necessary to his case.
The prejudice on which the District Court relied here was, indeed, of a different and more speculative variety. The court made no findings of fact relevant to the subject, but found it “apparent” that prejudice would accrue because “[t]he defendants might have chosen to exercise unusual zeal in having this court determine their rights at an earlier date had they known that back pay would be at issue.” 2 App. 498. This indulgent speculation is clearly not an adequate basis on which to deny the successful Title VII complainant compepsatory back-pay and surely even less of a reason for penalizing the members of the class that he represents.* In posing as an issue on remand “[wjhether the petitioners were in fact prejudiced,” ante, at 424 (emphasis added), the Court recognizes as much.
Although on the record now before us I have no doubt that respondents’ tardiness in asserting their claim to backpay was excusable in light of the uncertain state of the law during the first years of this litigation, I agree that the District Court should be the first to pass upon the issues as the Court has posed them. Doubtful though I remain about their ability to do so, petitioners are entitled at least to an opportunity to prove that respondents’ delay prejudiced their defense so substantially as to make an award of compensatory relief oppressive.

Even the District Court’s formulation, if founded upon proof that the defendants would have “chosen to exercise unusual zeal,” would only justify a limitation on the award of backpay to reflect the earlier date at which the court would have awarded it; in no event would it support the denial of all backpay relief.