SMU Law Review Forum

Ames, The Seventh Amendment, and the Honest Belief Trap Tautologizing Title VII

Amos N. Jones, Morgan State UniversityFollow

Abstract

A widely covered Sixth Circuit decision on July 29, 2025, against a tenured African American female law professor at the University of Michigan has dramatically materialized in the face of the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States only weeks earlier in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, decided on June 5, 2025. The Court had just eliminated another basis for employment-discrimination case dismissals, centering its original-textualist interpretative mode under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and buttressing plaintiffs’ Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury. Meanwhile, the Michigan panel in Beny v. University of Michigan was applying its “Honest Belief” doctrine, affirming a trial court’s dismissal of a high-profile lawsuit by reaching the factual conclusions that the employer’s mistaken conclusions harmful to the employee were excusable non-discrimination because of the presence of “honest belief.” The 3-0 panel effected a shutout in an intriguing case featuring eyebrow-raising factual disputes within a storied law school significant in historic American DEI jurisprudence.

The bombshell conflict presents an urgent setup for another U.S. Supreme Court tempering of judicial overreach, this time over the pattern of the lower courts’ substituting their conclusions of fact and credibility for those of juries. The current clash surfaces through a doctrine rejected by some circuits and implemented in others: Honest Belief. In this piece, the author illustrates that, by permitting any mistaken but “honest” rationale as legally sufficient to deny a Title VII claimant a trial by jury, the Honest Belief doctrine collapses the classical pretext analysis into a self-validating circle. In effect, purported honesty becomes its own proof, rendering discrimination law incoherent by insulating defendants from meaningful fact-finding as to motive. It is this logical circularity – an epistemic loop, as far as employment law is concerned – that calls for full exposition in order to move the discourse beyond partial critiques and toward a principled rejection of the doctrine altogether.

Although several prominent scholars have noticed and taken aim at the Honest Belief doctrine in recent years, their treatments have remained circumscribed. These works are appropriately critical, recognizing the doctrine’s lack of textual basis and its function as a judicial invention that offends Rule 56 protocols. Yet these contributions remain deferential to the idea that an employer’s Honest Belief might ever be a legitimate defense. This article goes further, exposing the doctrine’s inherent tautology and establishing that circularity as a fallacy irreconcilable with unanimous U.S. Supreme Court precedents dating back to 2003 overturning dismissals similar to the one in Beny.

Courts’ application of the Honest Belief Doctrine is contravening unanimous U.S. Supreme Court precedents, vitiating Seventh Amendment rights, and fostering juridical emotionalism. The result is the recurring imposition of clearly erroneous dismissals of Title VII cases that abrogate Plaintiffs’ Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury. The author concludes that the freshly prominent Honest Belief doctrine is a jurisprudential trap that the U.S. Supreme Court should eliminate immediately.