The majority inertprets the legislation in such a manner as to completely invalidate the entire statute.
Pay discrimination, like hostile work environment claims, typically (almost always), is the result of cumulative actions and cannot be detected by the victim as a concerted pattern of behavior - never mind be proven in a court of law - the moment the first discriminatory pay decision is made. It is entirely unlike a termination in that respect.

What the majority has done is force employees to bring pay claims before they can prove unlawful pay discrimination or wait until it can be proved and be denied by the statute of limitations. Is that reasonable under the canons of construction?

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A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the utmost extremes of injustice and oppression.
Edward Gibbon

The majority interprets the legislation in such a manner as must be derived from the way it is written. They had NO CHOICE but to uphold the 180-day deadline Congress deliberately and clearly inserted into the law. To do anything else, would be "legislating from the bench", as the minority so dearly wanted to do. But the majority did exactly what a proper court should do: it upheld the law as clearly written by Congress. If the law produced an unfavorable result, it's Congress's job to fix it, not the court's.

No, what CONGRESS has done is force employees to bring pay claims before they can prove unlawful pay discrimination or wait until it can be proved and be denied by the statute of limitations. And the court simply agreed that Congress had done that. Since no Constitutional violation was involved, the court had no power to do anything further, whether they happened to like the law Congress had written, or not... the desires of liberal judicial activists notwithstanding.

Under the canons of construction, yes, it is eminently reasonable. Under the viewpoint of "Should a law be written that makes it that way?", maybe it's a bad thing. If so, then the ball is in Congress's court - not the Supremes - to change it and make it right.

If you don't like laws that create such restrictions, get after your Congressmen and tell them not to be so careless when writing laws, as to permit such situations to come up. As you pointed out, this is not necessarily an isolated incident. It can affect ALL cases of wage discrimination, in the same way, whether according to sex, age, or whatever.

Maybe it's a bad law. But it's not something courts can change. That's Congress's job.

Call Congress and start telling them to do their job better. But stop trying to pretend it's the Courts' job to change the law - it emphatically isn't.

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The Constitution isn't perfect, but it's better than the system we're using now.

As has been repeatedly pointed out already in this thread, the issue is what constitutes a violation - not whether there is a deadline. Precedent (SCOTUS as well as lower court) says "the unlawful practice is the current payment of salaries infected by gender-based (or race-based) discrimination"
Concluding that congress deliberately crafted this law so as to be unenforceable is patently absurd when faced with the declared purpose of the legislation:
I don't see any intention to make the law unenforceable in that text.

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A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the utmost extremes of injustice and oppression.
Edward Gibbon

timj, you're the only one who seems to think the unenforcability (is that a word?) is deliberate. Why do you believe this?

Law are frequently products of compromise, negotiation, and half-fast attempts to mollify someone who is unhappy. The idea that they are beautifully-crafted flawless jewels, is naive to the point of absurdity. Chances are, someone wrote most of this law, then someone else said it had to have a deadline ro else he wouldn't vote for it, and so they threw in a 180-day deadline. And they did it in such a way that it combined with other vagueness which hadn't mattered until then, so that it became binding on parts (paycheck issuance) that it shouldn't have. But they didn't carefully check for such effects, and just passed it as a whole.

Unfortunately, the law as passed, DID restrict things that maybe it shouldn't have. A result of carelessness, or one too many long nights maybe, but now it is cast in stone. And it says clearly that triggering conditions that occurred more than 180 days before the suit is filed, can't be object of the suit. And the decision to pay the woman less than a man, strictly because of her sex, is one of the main conditions the law was meant to control.

The part of the bill you bolded, says that Congress intended to "correct the condition" of gender-based pay discrimination. Well, Congress did a lousy job of it, and left us with the present mess. They wrote a law prventing a woman from effectively suing for such discrimination. Maybe Congress can come up with excuses WHY they wrote the law so poorly, but excuses don't matter any more. This is THE LAW, and it clearly states the deadline. Subsequent misinterpretations by well-meaning but misguided courts, only put off the inevitable showdown when a law-abiding court was appointed... which is what has happened now.

Congress blew it - a not unusual occurrance. As I said earlier, if you don't like it, get on your congressman and tell him to get his act together and start writing bills that don't step on the toes they are trying to help.

But don't try to pretend the courts did something they shouldn't have. Badly as the law is written, it's still the written and ratified law, duly passed and signed. The courts have NO choice but to obey and uphold it. And their conclusion that the decision to pay the woman less was the important consideration, was reasonable. Subsequent issuance of paychecks was a mechanical process which violated no law and infringed no rights. Sure, if they wanted to help the woman out, they might have fudged a little and pretended the check-writers were doing an illegal thing.

BUT THE COURTS' JOB IS NOT TO HELP THE WOMAN. THAT'S CONGRESS'S JOB. The courts can only decide how the laws Congress wrote, badly or otherwise, now apply to the case. The courts can't un-blow what Congress blew, if you will. Only Congress can change the law. And they should.

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The Constitution isn't perfect, but it's better than the system we're using now.

I pointed out that the majority opinion makes the law unenforceable. You are the one who said "No, what CONGRESS has done" and you claim the court merely followed their intention. So I quoted the purpose statement to show you no that was not their intention.
Congress did as well as they ever do. The law is only unenforceable if the court ignores the most relevant precedent and the stated intention of congress as they did here.Please stop pretending the deadline is at issue here. For the third time I will point out the issue is what constitutes a violation that triggers the deadline.

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A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the utmost extremes of injustice and oppression.
Edward Gibbon

Exactly.

I said nothing of the kind.

I said the court merely followed the law they wrote. Which as we have seen, differs painfully from their stated intention.

If Congress had inserted into this law, a statement saying "This law shall only apply to women who are 5'9" or shorter", which part of the law should the Court follow? The statement of intention that said it was intended to corrrect the problem (presumably for all women), or the explicit statement excluding women of certain heights?

A silly example, of course, but one that illustrates clearly what the court faced. The court MUST give precedence to explicit statements, including those which semed to contradict a general intention. They must give Congress credit for having the sense to put in specifics only where they really wanted specifics... whether Congress deserves credit for that much sense or not. Which in this case, maybe they don't.

The good news is, Congress is allowed a do-over. As many as they want. They can change the law any time, with the President's signature. Whether they'll take the opportunity, remains to be seen.

Being a Congressman is easy - just get elected.
Being a GOOD Congressman is harder - in addition to getting elected, you have to watch for things like this in bills, and react appropriately.

We, the people, have to try to elect GOOD Congressmen, not just the ones who promise us the most goodies. If we don't, we get the government we deserve. Unfortunately, this woman just got the government we all deserve.

And she got it from Congress (and the Prez), not the courts.

This country is, and should be, based on the "rule of law". That means, you go by what the law says, not what someone persuades you it actually meant contrary to what it specifically says. Our courts have been on a long hiatus from that idea, making up their own law as they go, sometimes in flat contradiction to what the laws clearly says. They have been dabbling in the contrary doctrine called the "rule of men", which is horribly open to corruption, favoritism, the passions of the moment, all the bad things the Framers tried to avoid and lock out of our government.

Cases like this one mark a sea change in Court jurisprudence: they are beginning to return to the principle of the Rule of Law. As I said, this may be the best and longest-lasting legacy of George W. Bush: A return of the courts to law-abiding principles. It's too bad this woman got the short end of the stick. But as I pointed out, that's Congress's fault, not the Courts'. The Courts could find no Consitutional reason to throw out the law. And so they had to uphold and affirm what Congress had written, badly written though it was (as you and others have pointed out).

It would be nice if they could have fudged a little - in a just world, the woman would have been able to bring in the pattern of decisions to pay her less than the men, reaching back for the duration of her employment. But Congress cut off that justice at 180 days, quite explicitly, for whatever reasons they had. And so the court had no choice but to uphold that cutoff as duly enacted. Previous courts who ignored it, or who tried to pretend that the mechanical printing of checks in accordance with those previous decisions constituted "new violations", were not doing their jobs, and deserved to get reversed... which the Supreme Court has now correctly done.

Again, it would be nice if the courts could have helped her out. But our woeful history of judges getting an inch and then taking a mile, with the courts leaning further and further from what the law explicitly said until the original law was completely out of sight, unfortunately prohibits that. The courts should not yield an inch, any more. Because we know that more and more yielding will be demanded... from bitter lessons of our history. And they should - must - correct previous leanings away from the explicit law every chance they get. This is what they did in this case, going against the "precedents" of previous decisions that, in fact, violated the explicit provisions of the law.

And this is only the beginning. There are 70+ years of such unlawful deviations.

To put it another way, it took us 70 years to get to this point. We won't get back to the proper agenda of the Courts - the Rule of Law - overnight. But we must get back.

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The Constitution isn't perfect, but it's better than the system we're using now.

This is exactly wrong. The law specifies a time limit for filing a complaint after a violation. The legislation does not specify whether the pay decision alone is a violation or if the ongoing payment of discriminatory wages is a violation. The majority decided that only the pay decision is a violation and in doing so nullified the entire statute. In order to reach that decision they had to ignore the most relevant precedents and the stated intention of congress. That is exactly the opposite of following the "law they wrote"

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A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the utmost extremes of injustice and oppression.
Edward Gibbon