1. In Albemarle, did a showing that the employer had not acted in bad faith relieve the employer from a back pay obligation?
2. Why did the district court in Albemarle refuse to order a back pay remedy?
3. Does the Supreme Court agree with the district court’s ruling in Albemarle that it has unfettered discretion in fashioning a remedy?

[Respondents, a certified class of present and former Negro employees, brought this action against petitioners; their employer, Albemarle Paper Company; and the employees union, seeking injunctive relief against "any policy, practice, custom or usage" at the plant violative of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended by the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, and after several years of discovery, moved to add a class back pay demand. At this trial, the major issues were the plant's seniority system, its program of employment testing, and back pay. The district court found that following a reorganization under a new collective bargaining agreement, the Negro employees had been "locked" in the lowerpaying job classification and ordered petitioners to implement a system of plantwide seniority. The court refused, however, to order back pay for losses sustained by the plaintiff class under the discriminatory system on the grounds that (1) Albemarle's breach of Title VII was found not to have been in "bad faith" and (2) respondents had initially disclaimed interest in back pay and delayed making their back pay claim until five years after the complaint was filed, thereby prejudicing petitioners. The court also refused to enjoin or limit Albemarle's testing program, which respondents had contended had a disproportionate adverse impact on blacks and was not shown to be related to job performance. The court concluded that "personnel tests administered at the plant have undergone validation studies and have been proven to be job-related." Respondents appealed on the back pay and preemployment test issues. The court of appeals reversed the district court's judgment.]
STEWART, J….

The District Court's decision must therefore be measured against the purposes which inform Title VII. As the Court observed in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., the primary objective was a prophylactic one:

It was to achieve equality of employment opportunities and remove barriers that have operated in the past to favor an identifiable group of white employees over other employees.

Back pay has an obvious connection with this purpose. If employers faced only the prospect of an injunctive order, they would have little incentive to shun practices of dubious legality. It is the reasonably certain prospect of a back pay award that "provide[s] the spur or catalyst which causes employers and unions to self-examine and to self-evaluate their employment practices and to endeavor to eliminate, so far as possible, the last vestiges of an unfortunate and ignominious page in this country's history."

It is also the purpose of Title VII to make persons whole for injuries suffered on account of unlawful employment discrimination. This is shown by the very fact that Congress took care to arm the courts with full equitable powers….

It follows that, given a finding of unlawful discrimination, back pay should be denied only for reasons which, if applied generally, would not frustrate the central statutory purposes of eradicating discrimination throughout the economy and making persons whole for injuries suffered through past discrimination. The courts of appeals must maintain a consistent and principled application of the back pay provision, consonant with the twin statutory objectives, while at the same time recognizing that the trial court will often have the keener appreciation of those facts and circumstances peculiar to particular cases.

The District Court's stated grounds for denying back pay in this case must be tested against these standards. The first ground was that Albemarle's breach of Title VII had not been in "bad faith." This is not a sufficient reason for denying back pay. Where an employer has shown bad faith-by maintaining a practice which he knew to be illegal or of highly questionable legality-he can make no claims whatsoever on the Chancellor's conscience. But, under Title VII, the mere absence of bad faith simply opens the door to equity; it does not depress the scales in the employer's favor. If back pay were awardable only upon a showing of bad faith, the remedy would become a punishment for moral turpitude, rather than a compensation for workers' injuries. This would read the "make whole" purpose right out of Title VII, for a worker's injury is no less real simply because his employer did not inflict it in "bad faith." Title VII is not concerned with the employer's "good intent or absence of discriminatory intent" for "Congress directed the thrust of the Act to the consequences of employment practices, not simply the motivation." To condition the awarding of back pay on a showing of "bad faith" would be to open an enormous chasm between injunctive and back pay relief under Title VII. There is nothing on the face of the statute or in its legislative history that justifies that creation of drastic and categorical distinctions between those two remedies.…

[A synopsis of the remainder of the Court's opinion is as follows:

As is clear from Griggs, supra, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's guidelines for employers seeking to determine through professional validation studies whether employment tests are job-related, such tests are impermissible unless shown, by professionally acceptable methods, to be "predictive of or significantly correlated with important elements of work behavior which comprise or are relevant to the job or jobs for which candidates are being evaluated." Measured against the standard, Albemarle's validation study is materially defective in that (1) it would not, because of the odd patchwork of results from its application, have "validated" the two general ability tests used by Albemarle for all the skilled lines of progression for which the two tests are, apparently, now required; (2) it compared test scores with subjective supervisorial rankings, affording no means of knowing what job performance criteria the supervisors were considering; (3) it focused mostly on job groups near the top of various lines of progression, but the fact that the best of those employees working near the top of the lines of progression score well on a test does not necessarily mean that the test permissibly measures the qualifications of new workers entering lower level jobs; and (4) it dealt only with job-experienced white workers, but the tests themselves are given to new job applicants who are younger, largely inexperienced, and in many instances nonwhite.]

Accordingly, the judgment is vacated and remanded to the district court for proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.