NT Lakis lawyers have filed a “friend-of-the-court” brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in an important Title VII case involving the scope of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) authority to demand information from an employer as part of a discrimination charge investigation.
Our brief in McLane Company, Inc. v. EEOC, No. 15-1248 (brief filed May 6, 2016), urges the Court to review and reverse a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that rubber-stamped an overly-broad EEOC subpoena demanding nationwide and personally sensitive employee data that have no relevance to the allegations raised in the charge under investigation.
We argue that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in McLane disregards the plain language of Title VII, as well as ignores Supreme Court precedent making it clear that the EEOC is entitled to require an employer to produce only evidence relevant to the charge under investigation. We further contend that the McLane case presents an excellent opportunity for the Court to clarify the limits of the EEOC’s investigative authority, which we aver is especially important in light of the EEOC’s increasingly heavy-handed enforcement approach.
A copy of our brief in McLane is available here.
Members of the Equal Employment Advisory Council (EEAC) can read more here.