ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

Senior Judge Donald Lay, a Lyndon Johnson appointee to the Eighth Circuit, died Sunday.  He was 80.

Judge Lay was praised by a judge whose decisions were sometimes appealed to his court.  According to Chief Judge Robert W. Pratt of the Southern District of Iowa, Judge Lay was “among the last of the unapologetic liberals who believed deeply in the Warren Court revolution and saw the federal courts as the protector of civil and equal rights.” Judge Pratt added that Judge Lay was often “a bulwark against efforts to repeal or reform habeas corpus.” 

Among the most famous of Judge Lay’s opinions were two decisions upholding the equal rights of women to participate in employment and private organizations.  Lay dissented in the Eighth Circuit’s holding in Jaycees v. McClure, which allowed a private club to exclude female members in violation of a state statute.  The Supreme Court later adopted Lay’s dissent, which argued that holding that the state anti-discrimination law does not apply “relegated women to a status inferior to that of men.” 

Judge Lay also famously ruled in favor of a class action of female mine workers who alleged a pattern of sexual harassment over 20 years.  Lay’s decision was later praised by the authors of a book on that case, who wrote that the opinion “made corporate America take real note of [sexual harassment] for the first time, and established once and for all that women who are subjected to a hostile work environment need never stand alone again.”