An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast has won a US Supreme Court case against Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios Networks (ESN), dealing a major blow to Allen’s attempt to prove that Comcast’s refusal to carry ESN channels was motivated by racial bias. The key question taken up by the court was whether a claim of race discrimination under the 42 U.S.C. 1981 statute can proceed without a “but-for causation.” As the Legal Information Institute explains, a “but-for test” asks “but for the existence of X, would Y have occurred?”
The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in 2018 that the case could proceed because ESN “needed only to plausibly allege that discriminatory intent was a factor in Comcast’s refusal to contract, and not necessarily the but-for cause of that decision.” The Supreme Court ruling issued yesterday reversed that decision, saying that a “plaintiff bears the burden of showing that the plaintiff’s race was a but-for cause of its injury, and that burden remains constant over the life of the lawsuit.” Because of yesterday’s unanimous Supreme Court ruling, ESN would have to prove that racism was a determining (“but-for”) factor in Comcast’s decision rather than just one motivating factor. ESN and the National Association of African American Owned Media were seeking a $20 billion judgment because of Comcast’s refusal to pay for carriage of ESN networks, namely Cars.TV, Comedy.TV, ES.TV, JusticeCentral.TV, MyDestination.TV, Pets.TV, Recipe.TV, and The Weather Channel. Comcast has said it didn’t pay for ESN channels because of lack of customer demand for the company’s programming and the bandwidth costs of carrying the channels. Comedian and media mogul Byron Allen founded ESN in 1993 and is the company’s chairman and CEO. “Few legal principles are better established than the rule requiring a plaintiff to establish causation,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the court’s decision against ESN. “In the law of torts, this usually means a plaintiff must first plead and then prove that its injury would not have occurred ‘but for’ the defendant’s unlawful conduct. The plaintiffs before us suggest that 42 U.S.C.1981 departs from this traditional arrangement. But looking to this particular statute’s text and history, we see no evidence of an exception.”
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Source:: Slashdot