Court Opinion

ID: 9469217
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:35:32.468992+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:17.486900
License: Public Domain

TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
In 1972, Elizabeth Hishon accepted a position as an associate with King & Spalding, a large Atlanta law firm which operates as a general partnership. The partnership consists of approximately fifty active lawyers and employs approximately fifty additional lawyers as associates. At the time Hishon joined the firm, an associate was subject to discharge at the end of her sixth year. The firm also maintained an “out or up” policy whereby an associate who was not discharged at the end of the sixth year was invited to become a partner in the firm.
In May 1978, the partnership evaluated Hishon, along with other associates hired in 1972, and decided to discharge her from the firm; this of course rendered Hishon ineligible for partnership. She was promptly notified, and was granted the usual period of time to secure other employment. Eight months later, Hishon requested reconsideration of her discharge. At the conclusion of the May 1979 associate review meeting, the result was the same — Hishon’s discharge was confirmed. She left the firm on December 31, 1979.
This account of the process culminating in Elizabeth Hishon’s departure from King & Spalding differs from the majority’s only verbally. See ante majority opinion at 1024. The majority says that King & Spalding decided not to invite Hishon to become a partner, and that by operation of the firm’s uniformly applied “up or out” policy, Hishon incidentally had to leave the firm. The alternative account says that King & Spalding decided to fire Hishon, and that she was consequently not eligible for partnership.
The alternative is offered not to insinuate that the partners conspired to get rid of Hishon under the guise of denying her partnership. Rather, it is offered to suggest that in reviewing the district court’s dismissal of Hishon’s complaint, we should be concerned with the reality of the events alleged, and not with the conventional verbal garb in which those events are cloaked.
What “actually happened” is neither what the majority says happened nor what the alternative says happened. So far as we should be concerned, what happened is that the King & Spalding partnership, having reviewed and evaluated Hishon’s performance,- made a decision which they communicated to her. The direct consequence of this decision, mediated neither by Hi-shon’s will nor by any cause other than the partnership itself, was to deny Hishon membership and to terminate her employment. Regardless the words by which we know the decision, the decision was, undeniably, to discharge Hishon.
Hishon alleges, and we must assume, that King & Spalding discriminated against her on account of her sex by its decision to deny her partnership and to terminate her employment. The majority holds that “. . . when the termination is a result of the partnership decision, it loses its separate identity and must fall prey to the same ill-fate as her original attempt to apply Title VII to partnership decisions.” This is too glib for me. While I agree that Title VII would not apply to the discrete decision whether to take on a new partner,1 when the partnership decision inextricably and inevitably is a decision whether to terminate employment, I would hold that Title VII applies. Since this is such a case, I would reverse the district court’s dismissal of Hishon’s complaint and remand for further proceedings. I dissent.

. For example, Title VII would not apply to the partnership’s invitations to lawyers who were not associates in the firm.