Case Citator › Billet v. Cigna Corporation

Billet v. Cigna Corporation

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Overruled in part
Court
Third Circuit
Citation
940 F.2d 812
Decided
Confirmed treatments
1
Flagged citations read
58 of 58
Citing cases (total)
58
Treatment dates
1999
Overruled in part
A reviewed court has overruled part of this case’s holding. Billet v. Cigna Corporation was overruled in part on the fourth element of a prima facie age discrimination claim after a reduction in force. The Third Circuit held that a plaintiff may show that sufficiently younger employees were retained, without showing that the employer retained workers outside the ADEA’s protected age group.
More on how this was screened

The confirmed treatment is listed below. All 58 flagged citations have been read.

Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

58 later cases cite Billet v. Cigna Corporation; 58 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

Relying on Billet v. Cigna Corporation?

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Treatments

Overruled in part

  • The Third Circuit rejected Billet’s requirement that a worker laid off in a reduction in force identify retained employees outside the protected age group.

    Showalter v. University of Pittsburgh Medical Center · Third Circuit · filed

    In light of our opinions in Armbruster, Seman, and Billet, all of which held that the fourth element of a prima facie age discrimination case in a RIF context requires the plaintiff to show that unprotected workers were retained,3 the Magistrate Judge understandably applied this standard rather than requiring Showalter to show that the retained workers were "sufficiently younger" than he was at the time of discharge. See Keller, 130 F.3d at 1108; see also Healy v. New York Life Ins. Co., 860 F.2d 1209, 1214 n.1 (3d Cir. 1988) (holding, in a RIF context, that the fourth prima facie element is satisfied if the plaintiff can "show that he was discharged, while the company retained someone younger"). Nevertheless, in light of the Supreme Court's opinion in O'Connor v. Consolidated Coin Caterers Corp., 517 U.S. 308 (1996), we hold that the District Court should have applied the "sufficiently younger" standard instead of the "unprotected class membership" standard.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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