In Henry Ortiz v. Werner Enterprises, Inc., filed August 19, 2016, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of Henry Ortiz, reversing the district court’s summary judgment in favor of Werner Enterprises, Inc., in an employment discrimination case. Ortiz worked as a freight broker for Werner for seven years until his discharge in 2012. Werner claimed that it fired Ortiz for falsifying business records. Ortiz claimed that Werner fired him because of his Mexican ethnicity, after being subjected to ethnic slurs in the workplace throughout his tenure at Werner (“beaner,” “taco eater,” “dumb Mexican,” “Puerto Rican,” etc.). In reversing the summary judgment, the Court noted that the sole question that matters is “[w]hether a reasonable juror could conclude that Ortiz would have kept his job if he had a different ethnicity, and everything else stayed the same.” The Court found, among other things, that a reasonable juror could infer that Ortiz’s branch managers “didn’t much like Hispanics…” and “tried to force him out the door.” As a result, the Court held that a trial was necessary. Notably, the Court in its opinion overruled two lines of cases, those that treated “convincing mosaic” as a legal requirement, and those that used the direct-and-indirect framework, when deciding employment discrimination cases. Click here​ for more information.