"9-Zip! I Love It!"

By Andrea Sachs

Teresa Harris long ago stopped expecting speedy justice. Six years have passed since the Nashville, Tennessee, woman quit her job in despair because of her boss's taunts and bantering. Since then Harris, the former rental manager of an equipment company, has spent long hours sitting in courtrooms trying to convince judges that she was sexually harassed in violation of federal law. Last month, when she got to the Supreme Court, she was braced for another delay.

But this time Harris, 41, didn't have to wait. To the amazement of seasoned court watchers, the Supreme Court last week issued the equivalent of a judicial telegram, a terse, 9-to-0 decision in Harris' favor. It came only 27 days after oral arguments, a period so brief as to be virtually unprecedented. In a court renowned for innumerable footnotes and ponderous opinions, the Justices took a concise eight pages to clarify the standards for sexual harassment under Title VII, the federal discrimination law. The court's dramatic decision was no accident. "By acting quickly and unanimously, the court clearly intended to send a message to the lower courts, to employers and to the American public that the legal system will take women's claims of sexual harassment seriously," says Kathryn Abrams, a law professor at Cornell University.

The Supreme Court, which last ruled on sexual harassment in 1986, did not need stacks of legal documents to convince them that it was time for a fresh look at the issue. The subject has dominated the news over the past two years, from the Tailhook scandal that rocked the Navy to beleaguered Senator Robert Packwood, who is accused of harassing 26 women, to the case of Justice Clarence Thomas, who came close to being kept off the court in 1991 because of Anita Hill's accusations.

Thomas kept a conspicuously low profile during the Harris case, not uttering a word at oral arguments or writing any portion of the decision. As for Hill, the decision was welcome news. "The harasser does not have the right to harass to the point at which the woman is at her wit's end," Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, told TIME last week. "To the extent that's business as usual, that has ended."

Harris was ecstatic over the decision. "Twenty-seven days! Nine-zip! I love it!" Recalling the events that led her to quit her company in 1987, she told TIME, "At first I wanted to deny it was happening. Then I decided I would have to accept it and put up with it. I had two sons. I needed my job."

Her oppressor was Charles Hardy, president of the company. He would ask Harris and other female employees to retrieve coins from his front pants pocket. He once suggested that Harris accompany him to the local Holiday Inn to negotiate her raise. He also regularly responded to her with remarks like "You're a woman; what do you know?" and called her "a dumb-ass woman." Said Harris: "It got to the point that I didn't have any choice but to confront him. I had had enough." When he failed to change, she quit. "I felt so hopeless," she said. "I just can't tell you how terrible it was." She also sued. Lower courts, however, found that Hardy's comments were not "so severe as to be expected to seriously affect her psychological well-being"; they denied her claim.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the court, rejected the "psychological injury" standard. Federal law, she said, "comes into play before the harassing conduct leads to a nervous breakdown." While "merely offensive" conduct is not prohibited, she wrote, an employer has broken the law if a "reasonable person" would find the workplace so filled with sexual improprieties that it had become a hostile and abusive environment.

That standard will give juries and lower courts more leeway in deciding what behavior is illegal. But such flexibility proved troubling to Justice Antonin Scalia, who fretted in a concurring opinion that the court was giving juries little guidance. Still, he was hard pressed to come up with a better answer. "I know of no alternative to the course the court today has taken," he admitted. The first one to try out the guidelines will be Harris, who during her six years of waiting sought retraining and this year graduated with a nursing degree. Working for Vanderbilt University Hospital, she must now return to court to have her case tried under the new standard.

Women's groups were jubilant about the decision. Said Helen Neuborne, executive director of the NOW Legal Defense Fund: "We are thrilled with the court's strong message that when women suffer sexual harassment, they will be treated exactly the same as any other group discriminated against based on race, religion or national origin." Employers, many of whom have already begun to police their workplaces, for the most part supported the court's decision. Said Stephen Bokat, general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: "This is a very reasonable decision. It is really relatively easy under current law for an employer to preclude a suit for sexual harassment."

Since Anita Hill's sensational Senate testimony in 1991, federal sexual- harassment complaints have nearly doubled, from 6,892 in 1991 to 12,537 this year. "I have been consulted in the past month by a woman administrator in a college, two women in Wall Street firms, a woman in a consulting firm and a woman in the government," said Judith Vladeck, a prominent Manhattan sex- discrimination lawyer. Immediately after last week's decision, lawyers around the country felt the impact. Shelly Mandell, a Los Angeles attorney whose firm specializes in sexual-harassment cases, said that calls have tripled since the opinion was handed down. Said one advocate, barely suppressing his enthusiasm: "This case ends up being good for lawyers. The defense lawyers are happy because now employers are worried, and the plaintiffs' lawyers are happy because companies are going to settle."

| The decision marks a triumphant fulfillment of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's promise in August that she and O'Connor would help their male colleagues "look at life a bit differently." (Ginsburg wrote a brief concurrence, her first writing on the high bench.) Says law professor Susan Deller Ross, head of Georgetown University's Sex Discrimination Clinic: "This illustrates the merits of diversity. Men have not typically undergone a barrage of verbal abuse about their sexuality as a condition of having a job. I think they have a very difficult time understanding the impact of that." The seven men on the Supreme Court have apparently had their consciousness raised.

With reporting by Marc Hequet/St. Paul, Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles and Joyce Leviton/Atlanta