BYU Law Review
Abstract
For several years, my colleague and I had been litigating employment discrimination cases with facts that shocked our friends and family. For example, we fought Dallas County over a women-work-the-weekend policy that required women detention officers to work weekends while male colleagues took the weekends off. Likewise, we challenged the City of Cleveland when it moved our client, an emergency medical services supervisor, from the day shift to the night shift explicitly because he is Black. Then, in April 2024, in one of our client’s cases, Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled the decades of circuit precedent that had allowed this discriminatory workplace conduct to persist. The since-overruled precedent required Title VII plaintiffs to prove not only that they’d been discriminated against at work, but also that the discrimination significantly harmed their career prospects or their pocketbooks. Under this doctrine, courts had been behaving like their hands were tied when an employer discriminated against an employee at work without reducing their pay or otherwise formally demoting them. That meant that employers were getting away with discriminatory shift assignments, training, job tasks, and other disparate treatment—precisely the type of workplace discrimination that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was designed to stamp out.
Jatonya Muldrow is a Black woman who was discriminated against based on her sex, and she pursued her case all the way to the Supreme Court to ensure that she and others like her—those who have historically been subjected to subordinating discrimination—have access to Title VII remedies. She succeeded in the Court. But a growing narrative among court watchers, anti-DEI activists, and BigLaw’s compliance arms is that Muldrow v. City of St. Louis—an otherwise under-the radar anti-discrimination case (despite its potentially monumental impacts)—could be used to gut workplace DEI initiatives.
This Article argues that Muldrow will not have any genuine legal ramifications on thoughtful DEI initiatives and unpacks what’s driving the narrative that says otherwise. Correcting the record about Muldrow is critical to ensuring that its power as an anti-discrimination tool is realized.
Rights
2026 Brigham Young University Law Review
Recommended Citation
Madeline Meth,
Antidiscrimination, not Anti-DEI: The Real Story of the Supreme Court’s Recent Title VII Precedent,
51 BYU L. Rev.
1105
(2026).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol51/iss4/6
