Court Opinion

ID: 9426951
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:19.489702+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:04.050943
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Blackmun join,
concurring in the result and concurring in part.
I agree with, and join, Parts I and III of the Court’s opinion in this case and with its judgment. While I also agree with the Court’s conclusion in Part II of its opinion, holding that the District Court was “not in error” in holding the statutory height and weight requirements in this case to be invalidated by Title VII, ante, at 332, the issues with which that Part deals are bound to arise so frequently that I feel obliged to separately state the reasons for my agreement with its result. I view affirmance of the District Court in this respect as essentially dictated by the peculiarly limited factual and legal justifications offered below by appellants on behalf of the statutory requirements. For that reason-, I do not believe — and do not read the Court’s opinion as holding — that all or even many of the height and weight requirements imposed by States on applicants for a multitude of law enforcement agency jobs are pretermit-ted by today’s decision.
I agree that the statistics relied upon in this case are sufficient, absent rebuttal, to sustain a finding of a prima *338facie violation of § 703 (a)(2), in that they reveal a significant discrepancy between the numbers of men, as opposed to women, who are automatically disqualified by reason of the height and weight requirements. The fact that these statistics are national figures of height and weight, as opposed to statewide or pool-of-labor-force statistics, does not seem to me to require us to hold that the District Court erred as a matter of law in admitting them into evidence. See Hamling v. United States, 418 U. S. 87, 108, 124-125 (1974); cf. Zenith Corp. v. Hazeltine, 395 U. S. 100, 123-125 (1969). It is for the District Court, in the first instance, to determine whether these statistics appear sufficiently probative of the ultimate fact in issue — whether a given job qualification requirement has a disparate impact on some group protected by Title VII. Hazelwood School Dist. v. United States, ante, at 312-313; see Hamling v. United States, supra, at 108, 124-125; Mayor v. Educational Equality League, 415 U. S. 605, 621 n. 20 (1974); see also McAllister v. United States, 348 U. S. 19 (1954); United States v. Yellow Cab Co., 338 U. S. 338, 340-342 (1949). In making this determination, such statistics are to be considered in light of all other relevant facts and circumstances. Cf. Teamsters v. United States, 431 U. S. 324, 340 (1977). The statistics relied on here do not suffer from the obvious lack of relevancy of the statistics relied on by the District Court in Hazelwood School Dist. v. United States, ante, at 308. A reviewing court cannot say as a matter of law that they are irrelevant to the contested issue or so lacking in reliability as to be inadmissible.
If the defendants in a Title VII suit believe there to be any reason to discredit plaintiffs’ statistics that does not appear on their face, the opportunity to challenge them is available to the defendants just as in any other lawsuit. They may endeavor to impeach the reliability of the statistical evidence, they may offer rebutting evidence, or they may disparage in arguments or in briefs the probative weight which *339the plaintiffs’ evidence should be accorded. Since I agree with the Court that appellants made virtually no such effort, ante, at 331,1 also agree with it that the District Court cannot be said to have erred as a matter of law in finding that a prima facie case had been made out in the instant case.
While the District Court’s conclusion is by no means required by the proffered evidence, I am unable to conclude that the District Court’s finding in that respect was clearly erroneous. In other cases there could be different evidence which could lead a district court to conclude that height and weight are in fact an accurate enough predictor of strength to justify, under all the circumstances, such minima. Should the height and weight requirements be found to advance the job-related qualification of strength sufficiently to rebut the prima facie case, then, under our cases, the burden would shift back to appellee Rawlinson to demonstrate that other tests, without such disparate effect, would also meet that concern. Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody, 422 U. S. 405, 425 (1975). But, here, the District Court permissibly concluded that appellants had not shown enough of a nexus even to rebut the inference.
Appellants, in order to rebut the prima facie case under the statute, had the burden placed on them to advance job-related reasons for the qualification. McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Creen, 411 U. S. 792, 802 (1973). This burden could be shouldered by offering evidence or by making legal arguments not dependent on any new evidence. The District Court was confronted, however, with only one suggested job-related reason for the qualification — that of strength. Appellants argued only the job-relatedness of actual physical strength; they did not urge that an equally job-related qualification for prison guards is the appearance of strength. As the Court notes, the primary job of correctional counselor in Alabama prisons “is to maintain security and control of the inmates . . .,” ante, at 326, a function that I at least would *340imagine is aided by the psychological impact on prisoners of the presence of tall and heavy guards. If the appearance of strength had been urged upon the District Court here as a reason for the height and weight minima, I think that the District Court would surely have been entitled to reach a different result than it did. For, even if not perfectly correlated, I would think that Title VII would not preclude a State from saying that anyone under 5'2" or 120 pounds, no matter how strong in fact, does not have a sufficient appearance of strength to be a prison guard.
But once the burden has been placed on the defendant, it is then up to the defendant to articulate the asserted job-related reasons underlying the use of the minima. McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, supra., at 802; Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U. S. 424, 431 (1971); Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody, supra, at 425. Because of this burden, a reviewing court is not ordinarily justified in relying on arguments in favor of a job qualification that were not first presented to the trial court. Cf. United States v. Arnold, Schwinn & Co., 388 U. S. 365, 374 n. 5 (1967); Thomas v. Taylor, 224 U. S. 73, 84 (1912); Bell v. Bruen, 1 How. 169, 187 (1843). As appellants did not even present the “appearance of strength” contention to the District Court as an asserted job-related reason for the qualification requirements, I agree that their burden was not met. The District Court's holding thus did not deal with the question of whether such an assertion could or did rebut appellee Rawlinson’s prima facie case.