reduced the award of $700,000 to nominal damages, and denied Akouri’s
motion for a new trial.
Often at this point in the appeals process, the issues have to do not with
the original charges, but with procedure. In this case, two appeals courts
decided that Akouri had not provided enough documentation to warrant
the back-pay award: “the record is devoid of any evidence of [Akouri’s]
actual salary at the time he was employed by the DOT. Thus, there was no
figure from which the jury could have reasonably calculated net lost
wages.”
Note that in this case, evidence was enough to validate Akouri’s claims,
but not enough to convince the court that he was entitled to back pay. More
generally important: the court did not direct the Defendant to take any
action to correct or improve their procedures for hiring and promoting.
Kyomugisha v. Clowney and the University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee^16
In the early 1990s, Florence Kyomugisha left her native Uganda for the
U.S., where she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee as a
graduate student in political science.
Ms. Kyomugisha was a native speaker of Runyankole and Luganda,
indigenous languages of Uganda, as well as of English.^17 She attended
Makerere University in Kampala before applying to the graduate program
at the University of Wisconsin.
As a student, Kyomugisha began employment in UW-M’s Office of
Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity. Over the course of the next
four years, three different supervisors were so satisfied with her
performance that she was promoted to Administrative Program Specialist.
Then a new Assistant Chancellor for Equal Opportunity was hired.
In the next few months, Assistant Chancellor Charmaine Clowney made
numerous and documented demeaning and hostile remarks about
Kyomugisha’s Ugandan accent, excluded her from making oral