Whether the Fifth Circuit's rigid evidentiary standards for employment discrimination claims impermissibly restrict plaintiffs' ability to prove discrimination and survive summary judgment

The lower courts are intractably divided on the quantum and character of evidence a plaintiff must produce to survive summary judgment in an employment discrimination case. The Fifth Circuit has erected a series of uniquely restrictive, judge-made evidentiary hurdles that conflict with the plain text of federal anti-discrimination statutes, contravene this Court's precedents, and foreclose meritorious claims from reaching a jury. The questions presented are: • Whether the Fifth Circuit's rigid, four-part test for dismissing discriminatory remarks as legally irrelevant "stray remarks" unless made by a final decision-maker —a test this Court implicitly rejected in Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc., 530 U.S. 133 (2000) —impermissibly usurps the jury's role of weighing evidence and assessing credibility. • Whether an employer may escape liability when a supervisor with blatant discriminatory animus initiates and proximately causes a termination, simply because the final sign-off comes from an ostensibly unbiased official —a question that has divided the circuits and on which the Fifth Circuit's analysis is in direct tension with this Court's holding in Staub v. Proctor Hospital, 562 U.S. 411 (2011). • Whether the Fifth Circuit's requirement that plaintiffs produce a "nearly identical" comparator to prove disparate treatment imposes an evidentiary burden so severe that it functionally immunizes employers from liability, in direct conflict with the more flexible and realistic "all material respects" standard adopted by a majority of other circuits.