Supreme Court set to hear family-leave case

Inside a threadbare home in Nevada's desolate high desert, Bill Hibbs, 46, collects disability payments for his heavily sedated wife and yearns for a final victory over the state he says stole his future.

Four vehicles, his horses and a $140,000 house are gone. He has no medical insurance, and his wife, Diane, is a shell of her former self, depending on medication to lessen pain lingering from a 1996 car crash.

Now, five years after he was fired by the Nevada welfare office for missing work while caring for his wife, Hibbs has his best shot at getting some of that life back.

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday in a case that began with an attempt to restore Hibbs to his job, and has since become a widely watched test of federal labor law -- a tug of war between states' rights and the reach of the federal government to correct discrimination.

Hibbs, citing the federal Family Medical Leave Act, believes he was discriminated against, denied additional time off work because he is male.

Caring for family

The Supreme Court is to decide whether state workers such as Hibbs, who lives in tiny McGill, Nev., can sue agencies for denying them time off to care for ailing family members.

The state claims it is constitutionally immune from Hibbs' lawsuit under the 11th Amendment, which gives states "sovereign immunity" from certain lawsuits.

Congress can override state immunity with legislation, as it did in 1960s civil rights laws designed to remedy violations of the 14th amendment's equal-protection clause.

Several labor unions, family advocacy groups and the federal government say that principle should apply in the case of the 1993 Family Medical Leave Act because it combats and corrects state gender discrimination.

Nevada and 12 other states say it doesn't, and that Congress was not justified in overriding its immunity.

Hibbs' problems began with a 1996 Mother's Day car accident. His wife suffered neck and spine injuries when a driver ran a red light in Reno and slammed into the family's pickup truck.

Hibbs missed work for more than five months in 1997 to care for her, using time donated by colleagues and leave he thought was guaranteed under federal law.

But he was dismissed for not working from August through mid-November because the state had counted his medical leave concurrently with the donated "catastrophic" time off.

Hibbs maintains he was treated unfairly.

His lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge, but that was reversed by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that states are subject to such lawsuits because of "widespread intentional discrimination."

The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit cited studies showing gender discrimination by states that had granted leave to women but not men.

Nevada Deputy Attorney General Paul Taggart fiercely disputes the 9th Circuit's finding.

"We think that allegation is shocking, to say that all 50 states as a general matter can be assumed to be discriminating against their employees," Taggart said.

The U.S. Solicitor General's office in Washington is arguing on Hibbs' behalf.

The law established a "gender-neutral, uniform family-leave floor" that was designed to "attack discrimination against women in hiring and promotions and against men seeking family-care leave," the government wrote in a court brief.

However, the case is similar to one the court decided in 2001 in which it forbid state workers from using a federal disability rights law to sue their employers for money damages for on-the-job discrimination.

Since the accident, Diane Hibbs has undergone a dozen expensive operations.

Without health insurance, Hibbs paid the surgeons by selling off horses, three off-road vehicles, two classic cars, a truck, van, and eventually their house near Virginia City. The $6,500 house they moved into at McGill had been abandoned for eight years.

"Every penny I had went to pay for her operations," Hibbs said. "But she never got better."

Hibbs now supports his wife and two teenage children on $1,000 a month, working part-time for the federal Housing and Urban Development agency.

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The case is Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, 01-1368.