🚨 Torres v. Texas Dept of Public Safety. Court holds that states agreed to give up their sovereign

[In It to Win It]

Leah Litman
@LeahLitman

Last #SCOTUS opinion: Torres v. Texas Dept of Public Safety. Court holds that states agreed to give up their sovereign immunity from lawsuits when the federal government exercises its power to raise & support the Armed Forces. Op is 5-4 by Breyer. https://supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-603_o758.pdf

I'm very happy that Justice Breyer got to write a majority opinion in a sovereign immunity case!

Link to tweet

[LeftInTX]

1. This is an employment discrimination case. Torres was employed by DPS, deployed, but not rehired

Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA)

Leroy Torres enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1989. In 1998, he was employed by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) as a trooper, where he served until his deployment to Iraq in 2007. In 2008, he was honorably discharged and sought reemployment by DPS. However, due to a lung condition he acquired in Iraq, Torres requested employment with DPS in a position different from the one he held before. Instead, DPS offered Torres only a “temporary duty offer,” which he declined.

Torres sued DPS in 2017, alleging that the agency’s failure to offer him a job that would accommodate his disability violated the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA), which prohibits adverse employment actions against an employee based on the employee’s military service. The trial court ruled in favor of Torres, finding that USERRA properly abrogated DPS’s sovereign immunity under Congress’s constitutional war powers. The appellate court reversed.

Question
Did Congress properly abrogate state sovereign immunity for claims arising under the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA)?
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2021/20-603