California employment case index

The Supreme Court’s foundational “cat’s paw” decision: an employer is liable when a biased supervisor performs an act intended to cause an adverse employment action that is a proximate cause of the ultimate decision — even if the formal decisionmaker had no discriminatory animus. A decisionmaker’s “independent investigation” does not automatically break the causal chain, especially when it credits the biased actor’s report without independently confirming the action was justified.

Three different doctrines collide in public-sector termination cases, and collapsing them is the most expensive mistake in this corner of California employment law. Exhaustion of administrative remedies is a prerequisite to suing at all. Exhaustion of judicial remedies is the separate Westlake requirement that an employee who has already lost before a personnel board overturn that decision by administrative mandamus under Code of Civil Procedure section 1094.5 before suing on the same facts. And collateral estoppel is what happens if the employee does not: the agency's findings become final and bind. Johnson v. City of Loma Linda extended the rule to FEHA while holding it inapplicable to Title VII, Page applied it on demurrer, and Skelly supplies the due-process floor the agency hearing must meet. This analysis keeps the three apart, states what each anchor actually held and how it was disposed of, and sets out the sequencing obligation a practitioner owes a public-employee client at intake.

Nine days after Fatmeh Badih told her employer — a physician with fewer than five employees — that she was pregnant, her last day was set; the DFEH would not even accept her complaint because the office was too small for the FEHA. Division One of the First District affirmed her wrongful-discharge verdict anyway, holding that pregnancy discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under article I, section 8 of the California Constitution, whose fundamental public policy against sex discrimination in employment binds every employer regardless of size. Jennings v. Marralle was distinguished, not disturbed: age has no constitutional anchor, but sex — and therefore pregnancy — does. Badih remains the pleading answer for pregnancy discharges at California's smallest workplaces.