Alaska Employment Law

U. S. District Judge Timothy Burgess has held that Title VII bars injunctive, as well as damages relief against an individual defendant.  He joins Judge Sedwick, who reached the same result in an earlier case.

Burgess wrote:

Defendant Lewis asserts that Ninth Circuit law requires the Court to dismiss the discrimination claim because the definition of “employer” under Title VII does not encompass individual supervising employees. The Court agrees. As noted by Lewis, the Ninth Circuit in Miller v. Maxwell’s International, Inc., affirmed a district court’s dismissal of the plaintiff’s discrimination claim for damages on this ground, stating that: “If Congress decided to protect small entities with limited resources from liability, it is inconceivable that Congress intended to allow civil liability to run against individual employees.”

The Court’s conclusion applies to Plaintiff’s claim for both damages and injunctive relief.  Miller did not expressly address the availability of injunctive relief. But as Lewis points out, a court in this district has interpreted both Miller and an earlier case, Padway v. Pulches, as barring injunctive relief against individual employees.   The Court agrees with this approach.

The earlier case is Mun v. Univ. of Alaska at Anchorage, 2005 WL 846205 (D. Alaska).

McBeath v. University of Alaska and Carole Lewis, Case No. 3:08-cv-00008 TMB (D.Alaska Order of Feb. 13, 2009)(footnotes omitted).

Joe Josephson represents plaintiff.  Mark Ashburn represents the University.  Both practice in Anchorage.