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Constitutional Law Keyed to Choper
Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney
Citation:
442 U.S. 256 (1979)Facts
Helen Feeney worked in Massachusetts civil service for 12 years, consistently scoring high on competitive exams for better positions. Despite her high scores, she was repeatedly denied promotions because Massachusetts law gave absolute preference to veterans who achieved passing scores, regardless of their relative ranking. The veterans’ preference dated back to 1884 and had been modified over time, but maintained its core feature of prioritizing veterans over non-veterans. When the litigation commenced, over 98% of veterans in Massachusetts were male, and only 1.8% were female, largely due to historical federal military policies that limited women’s participation in the armed forces. Feeney argued that the preference system inevitably operated to exclude women from consideration for the best civil service jobs and thus unconstitutionally denied them equal protection under the law.
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