WASHINGTON-Public employers could face increased employment disputes as a result of the Supreme Court's ruling last week that the U.S. Constitution does not shield states from lawsuits alleging violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act, a leading benefits lawyer says.

"The significance is not so much the ruling on whether or not a state is immune-it's the practical implications of applying FMLA to public employers," said Gerald L Maatman Jr., a partner in the Chicago law firm Seyfarth Shaw.

"It's important because private employers think FMLA is the most difficult statute to administer and there will be an interesting interplay between what are normally complex civil service rules governing public employees as compared to FMLA's requirements for leaves of absence. The practical import is public employers facing more lawsuits," he said.

The case-Nevada Department of Human Resources vs. William Hibbs-involves a former Nevada state employee who requested and received 12 weeks' leave under the FMLA to care for his wife (BI, July 1, 2002). The employee, William Hibbs, also requested and received 380 hours of paid leave from the state's catastrophic leave program. But according to court papers, the state told Mr. Hibbs that the state catastrophic leave would count against his FMLA leave period, a point he disputed. After Mr. Hibbs took more than the allotted FMLA leave, the state disciplined and ultimately fired him.

Mr. Hibbs sued, alleging violations of the FMLA, but Nevada countered that the Constitution's 11th Amendment granted it sovereign immunity against such suits. A district court agreed, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to abrogate state sovereign immunity and that the FMLA did just that. The state appealed, and on May 26, the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-to-3 margin that state employees have the right to sue for alleged FMLA violations.

Congress is well within its authority to abrogate state law under certain circumstances, and the FMLA clearly met those circumstances, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the majority. It had created an "across-the-board, routine employment benefit for all eligible employees" so that "family leave would no longer be stigmatized as an inordinate drain on the workplace caused by female workers and that employers could not evade leave obligations simply by hiring men," he wrote.

Nevada Department of Human Resources vs. William Hibbs, U.S. Supreme Court; No. 01-1368. Decided May 27, 2003.