Gregory Michael Majersky v. Denver Public Schools

Whether a federal court of appeals may evade this Court's decision in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, 145 S. Ct. 1540 (2025), after expressly acknowledging that the district court applied a legal standard "rendered invalid" by Ames, by invoking the alternative-grounds doctrine to conclude that the complaint "still failed to plead facts" showing an inference of discrimination without affording the pro se petitioner any opportunity to replead under the constitutionally required standard, where: (a) the entire proceeding was conducted under the invalid standard at the pleading stage before discovery; (b) the pro se plaintiff was affirmatively instructed to satisfy the now-invalidated requirements; and (c) no independent analysis under the correct Ames standard exists in the record.

Whether, at the pleading stage under Rule 12(b)(6), a Title VII plaintiff must allege trial-level comparator identity—including identical job title, identical immediate supervisor, and identical misconduct—or whether allegations that employees were subject to the same employer policies and disciplinary authority, and were treated materially differently for conduct of objectively greater seriousness known to the employer, suffice to state a plausible claim under this Court's precedents, where: (a) this Court’s holding in Ames forbids heightened evidentiary standards for majority-group plaintiffs; (b) this Court's holdings in Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N.A., 534 U.S. 506 (2002), Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, 144 S. Ct. 967 (2024), and Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc., 530 U.S. 133 (2000), require only plausible pleading and forbid trial-level proof at the motion to dismiss stage; (c) the complaint alleges 100% overlap in ultimate decision-makers (the same Human Resources personnel investigated both employees and made both final employment decisions); (d) formal governmental findings by the Denver Police Department and Colorado Child Protective Services document the objective seriousness of the comparator's conduct; and (e) an inverted severity-sanction relationship exists (identical decision-makers imposed the harshest sanction for the objectively less serious violation while imposing no sanction for the objectively more serious violation documented by governmental agencies).