Court rules Title IX covers whistle-blower

The ruling was cheered by women's advocates who said the protection would encourage reports of bias that otherwise would never be made. School boards decried it as unfairly exposing them to a new wave of lawsuits.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority, said Roderick Jackson, a high school girls' basketball coach in Birmingham, Ala., was entitled to pursue a Title IX lawsuit after he was fired for complaining that the boys' team got better treatment.

''Teachers and coaches such as Jackson are often in the best position to vindicate the rights of their students because they are better able to identify discrimination and bring it to the attention of administrators," O'Connor wrote.

''Without protection from retaliation, individuals who witness discrimination would likely not report it," she said, and charges that a school was ''deliberately indifferent" to sexual harassment would similarly go unnoticed.

O'Connor was joined by the court's liberal wing -- Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer.

The dissent was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the former head of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that investigates claims of discrimination in the workplace. He decried the ruling as defying the language of the congressional statute, which requires that a lawsuit filed under Title IX be for ''sex discrimination."

''A claim of retaliation is not a claim of discrimination on the basis of sex," Thomas wrote, noting that other civil rights laws have specific provisions addressing retaliation. ''The question before us is only whether Title IX prohibits retaliation, not whether prohibiting it is good policy."

Thomas was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

Title IX, the 1972 law best known for promoting women's athletics, bars sex discrimination in any educational program receiving federal funds. It already was settled law that students or others could sue if they thought they were shortchanged based on their sex.