Court Opinion

ID: 9487720
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:24:33.309504+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:26.836337
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
In my view, plaintiff has not sustained his burden of providing sufficient evidence that age was a factor in Hussmann’s decision to terminate him. Indeed, he is grasping at straws. I find nothing in Hussmann’s method of termination that betrays an illegal animus; and the statement about its hiring practices is virtually weightless since this is not a failure-to-hire ease, and the remark was made almost a decade before plaintiffs termination. This leaves only the comment about antiquated books as evidence of age-based discrimination.
With respect, I find the court’s reliance on this stray comment quite misplaced. In the first place, it might have been a mere jocularity. Federal law has virtually transformed our offices and factories into completely humorless places: There is evidently nothing that a person can say that cannot be remade into something dark and actionable by a sufficiently suspicious imagination. The right to speak, formerly an object of jealous protection by the federal courts, has been *267turned on its head and made into a right to be free from imaginary insult. Second, we can take judicial notice that the useful half-life of engineering knowledge acquired in the 1950s turned out to be perhaps three years, four years at the most. Less than one percent of what is contained in some engineering books produced in the 1950s, therefore, would be of any practical utility. That an employer could be held liable for saying so is more than a little surprising.
I therefore respectfully dissent.