Section 7

Citation: Section 7
Parent Document: Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)
Jurisdiction: United States (federal)
Effective Date: 2020-06-15
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4760997/bostock-v-clayton-county/ ↗

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Why isn’t that enough to demonstrate that today’s result
isn’t totally unexpected? How many people have to foresee
the application for it to qualify as “expected”? Do we look
only at the moment the statute was enacted, or do we allow
some time for the implications of a new statute to be worked
out? Should we consider the expectations of those who had
no reason to give a particular application any thought or
only those with reason to think about the question? How
do we account for those who change their minds over time,
after learning new facts or hearing a new argument? How
specifically or generally should we frame the “application”
at issue? None of these questions have obvious answers,
and the employers don’t propose any.
   One could also reasonably fear that objections about un-
expected applications will not be deployed neutrally. Often
lurking just behind such objections resides a cynicism that
Congress could not possibly have meant to protect a disfa-
vored group. Take this Court’s encounter with the Ameri-
cans with Disabilities Act’s directive that no “ ‘public en-
tity’ ” can discriminate against any “ ‘qualified individual
with a disability.’ ” Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections v.
Yeskey, 524 U. S. 206, 208 (1998). Congress, of course,
didn’t list every public entity the statute would apply to.
And no one batted an eye at its application to, say, post of-
fices. But when the statute was applied to prisons, curi-
ously, some demanded a closer look: Pennsylvania argued
that “Congress did not ‘envisio[n] that the ADA would be
applied to state prisoners.’ ” Id., at 211–212. This Court
emphatically rejected that view, explaining that, “in the
context of an unambiguous statutory text,” whether a spe-
cific application was anticipated by Congress “is irrele-
vant.” Id., at 212. As Yeskey and today’s cases exemplify,
applying protective laws to groups that were politically un-
popular at the time of the law’s passage—whether prison-
ers in the 1990s or homosexual and transgender employees
28              BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY Opinion of the Court

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