Court Opinion

ID: 9489888
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:26:54.249428+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:46.525865
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
We all agree that the district court erred in finding that Nidds had not made a prima facie case. He had, and the burden shifted to Schindler to produce a nonpretextual nondiscriminatory reason for his discharge. What we disagree about is whether Nidds produced enough evidence from which a reasonable juror could have inferred that Schindler’s reason was pretextual and that in fact it laid him off because of his age.
Nidds had two witnesses (not one, as the court appears to assume) whose evidence was that Graham, the district superintendent, wanted to get rid of the “Old Timers.” The court in its opinion suggests that Graham’s comment was “ambiguous.” There was not much ambiguity about it. That the Old Timers would not kowtow to Graham was connected by him to their length of service; and length of service in this industry meant being over forty. In his comment to Julia Stuart, Schindler’s Assistant Field Supervisor, Graham said that he wanted to replace the Old Timers with “new blood” — another distinct reference to age. Even if I agreed with the court that the remark was ambiguous, a reasonable juror could resolve whatever ambiguity there is by an inference in Nidds’ favor. We’re operating under circuit law which is unequivocal in setting “a high standard for the granting of summary judgment in employment discrimination cases.” Schnidrig v. Columbia Mach., Inc., 80 F.3d 1406, 1410 (9th Cir.1996), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 295, 136 L.Ed.2d 214 (1996). The standard should not unaccountedly be lowered.
Nidds’ evidence of discriminatory intent is properly taken into account with Schindler’s shifting explanation of why it laid him off. Schindler said, first, that it was seniority and stuck to that in a proceeding before the DFEH; finally, when pressed, a year after the layoff Schindler said Nidds was a poor performer on the newer Solid State equipment. Yet when Schindler took Nidds back only four months later, it assigned him to a service route in Oakland which had over twice as many units of Solid State equipment as his old route, and Graham said that Nidds was “the most qualified person at that time.” A reasonable jury could easily infer that Schindler was cloaking the discrimination already expressed by Graham with these made-up stories of why the company laid off *863this old and experienced and efficient employee whom Graham had rated as “excellent.”
As to retaliation, it is Nidds’ evidence that assignment to Geneva Towers was the company’s not very nice and not very subtle way of dumping employees it wanted to punish; and it was the convenient prelude to pushing him out altogether. Schindler put him there shortly after Schindler had pointedly inquired about his discrimination filing before the DFEH. Within two months, Nidds was fired from this route as a result of a letter which in so many words indicates that the request of Geneva Towers to remove Nidds was coordinated with Schindler management. The opinion of the court turns somersaults trying to explain why Nidds’ evidence on this point should not be believed. The opinion includes a pure speculation as to whether two incidents of gang violence in a gang-infested neighborhood could occur within a month. It’s good jury reasoning. It’s highly inappropriate for an appellate body or for a district court that is supposed to respect the different functions of judge and jury.
We are dealing here not with some procedural rule or even with a statutory direction. We are under compulsion of a constitutional command entitling persons to trial by jury as it existed at common law. U.S. Const, amend. VII. The time at which the common law right existed is the time when the Seventh Amendment was adopted. Markman v. Westview Instruments, Inc., — U.S. -, -, 116 S.Ct. 1384, 1389, 134 L.Ed.2d 577 (1996). The test is historical. Id. A wealth of new scholarship indicates how sensitive to jury verdicts even a fairly high-handed but wise judge such as Lord Mansfield was at the time at the time of our Revolution. See, e.g., Olney v. Allen, (K.B.1783), in 1 The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century 354-55 (James Oldham, ed. 1992); Harris v. Worsley, (K.B.1773), in 2 id. 1129-1130 (the jury verdict, upheld by Mansfield, was in his words: “To the astonishment of every body”).
It can happen that a judge distrustful of a jury’s sympathy for the hard luck of a plaintiff, or a judge conscious that he is the master of the facts and can speed up the process by killing a case early, will enter summary judgment where there are facts open to different interpretation by the jury. ’ However benevolent the judge’s motive, the judge is denying the litigants their constitutional right to trial by their peers. We should be the last to give countenance or comfort to such a departure from the basic structure of our law. Therefore, I dissent.