Discussion for article #233051
But I thought Nationwide is on your side?
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Uh, I am glad the author recognized in the last paragraph that this story deserves to be debunked on snopes.com. The Supreme Court did not say that men lactate too. Period. It denied review of the trial court’s dismissal of the plaintiff’s case. From the linked article, it is clear that the trial court dismissed the case for a number of reasons that go far beyond the argument that men lactate too. I am not a huge fan of this Supreme Court, but their job isn’t really to correct comments made by trial courts that have little or nothing to do with the ultimate outcome of the case.
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This. The overall finding had nothing to do with men lactating. It was because the Plaintiff didn’t pursue all her administrative remedies before suing. As a lawyer, this kind of story and its clear attempt to be click bait is very frustrating.
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You aren’t Raw Story, guys. This an award-winning news site. There is no excuse for running a piece that is flagrantly, facially inaccurate.
First, the Supreme Court wasn’t asked to consider anything about male lactation, not even by Ms. Ames’ attorneys. They asked the Court to consider two questions:
(1) In a constructive discharge case, must the plaintiff also prove that the employer acted with the intent of forcing the plaintiff to resign?
(2) In a constructive discharge case, must the plaintiff also prove that before resigning he or she complained sufficiently to the employer about the discrimination?
Those are the only questions they presented. Nothing about the facts of the case were at issue. Moreover, the 8th Circuit opinion that the Court was being asked to overrule had nothing to do with male lactation. The issue wasn’t a part of this case past the trial court. Anyone saying it was doesn’t understand how appellate law works: based on this article, I am confident putting Dr. Bowern squarely in that camp.
Second, Dr. Bowern misstates what kind of a decision the Court just made, and what precedential value it has (again, because she is ignorant of how appellate law works). This was a denial of a petition for certiorari. The Supreme Court gets thousands of these petitions each term, and only accepts between 80-100. That doesn’t mean they are endorsing the lower court rulings in the cases they don’t take. Quite the opposite, in fact - they’re declining to review the lower court opinions at all. They deny cert for any number of reasons, and they deny cert on the vast majority of petitions that come before them. This is why no practitioner, no Court reporter, and no lower court will consider the denial of a cert petition to have any precedential value, or in any way reflect the Court’s opinion on a subject. In this case, you certainly can’t say that the Court, by denying cert, accepted a trial court’s factual determination that was not the subject of the appeal to the 8th Circuit and was never presented as a question in the cert petition. Yet look at the headline and the article: that’s the assertion being made, and it is stunningly wrong.
This is simply and inarguably a false story. As a journalistic outlet, especially one that has made a mark holding other reporters accountable, you owe us better.
Please retract this and issue a correction.
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Wut? Seriously, does SCOTUS want to destroy any last vestige of respect the country might have for it? Is this the long game conservatives are playing?
What really bugs me is that this isn’t the first time TPM made this error, conflating a cert denial with a ruling. It happened in October as well. To my knowledge, however, it is the first time that more than the headline has depended on that mistake.
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Good grief! Does it never stop?