Professor Jennifer Smith’s lawsuit against Florida A&M University for equal pay and sex bias will not be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court declined to hear her case last month.
Smith, a tenured professor who teachers federal civil procedure, sued the school in 2014, and after a federal jury determined in 2015 that sex was not a factor in the pay disparities between female and male professors, Smith appealed the decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the proceedings before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, it was argued that a witness for the university alluded to a list of professor salaries that wasn’t part of the discovery presented to the plaintiff, and although Smith did not object, she later moved for a new trial, calling that an ambush. Her motion for a new trial was denied. Smith represented herself in her appeal.
After the courts decided in favor of the university, Smith applied for a promotion for the fourth time, but, like other attempts, she was denied. She appealed to the courts again for a new trial based on those developments, but her motion was again denied by district courts.
After the initial trial, FAMU conducted an internal pay study and raised the salaries of one third of law school faculty. The initial recommendation was to increase Smith’s pay to $138,000, to nearly match the highest-paid male associate professor. Instead, her salary was increased to $125,000, and the highest paid male associate professor was called an “outlier.”
"What the 11th Circuit really created was a law that allows for employers to label highest paid, which are traditionally men, as outliers," said Smith in an interview with Reuters.