614
Opinion of the Court
text, see Hicks v. St. Mary's Honor Center, 970 F. 2d 487 (CA8 1992), cert. granted, 506 U. S. 1042 (1993), and we will not address it prematurely. We therefore remand the case for the Court of Appeals to reconsider whether the jury had sufficient evidence to find an ADEA violation.
B
Because we remand for further proceedings, we also address the second question upon which certiorari was granted: the meaning of "willful" in § 7(b) of the ADEA, which provides for liquidated damages in the case of a "willful" violation.
In Thurston, we thoroughly analyzed § 7(b) and concluded that "a violation of the Act [would be] 'willful' if the employer knew or showed reckless disregard for the matter of whether its conduct was prohibited by the ADEA." 469 U. S., at 126 (internal quotation marks and ellipsis omitted). We sifted through the legislative history of § 7(b), which had derived from § 16(a) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), 52 Stat. 1069, as amended, 29 U. S. C. § 216(a), and determined that the accepted judicial interpretation of § 16(a) at the time of the passage of the ADEA supported the "knowledge or reckless disregard" standard. See 469 U. S., at 126. We found that this standard was consistent with the meaning of "willful" in other criminal and civil statutes. See id., at 126-127. Finally, we observed that Congress aimed to create a "two-tiered liability scheme," under which some, but not all, ADEA violations would give rise to liquidated damages. We therefore rejected a broader definition of "willful" providing for liquidated damages whenever the employer knew that the ADEA was "in the picture." See id., at 127-128.
In McLaughlin v. Richland Shoe Co., 486 U. S. 128 (1988), an FLSA case, we reaffirmed the Thurston standard. The question in Richland Shoe was whether the limitations pro-
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