Weighing Temporal Proximity in Title VII Retaliation Claims

Abstract

In recent years, employment discrimination retaliation claims have been a growing focus of federal employment law. The primary source of this protection has been § 704(a) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII retaliation claims are litigated using a common judicial framework originally developed for discrimination claims. Courts differ, however, in their individual application of this framework and, as a result, vary significantly in their standards for litigating a Title VII retaliation claim. A significant source of this disparity has been the way in which courts treat the time that elapses between an employee's anti-discrimination activity and an employer's allegedly retaliatory action ("temporal proximity"). This Note evaluates the conflicting approaches to the element of temporal proximity. It concludes that despite the conflicting treatment of temporal proximity evidence by different federal jurisdictions, a single, optimal rule for such evidence can be identified.