Cite as: 513 U. S. 352 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
specting nondiscrimination in the work force is itself important, for the occurrence of violations may disclose patterns of noncompliance resulting from a misappreciation of the Act's operation or entrenched resistance to its commands, either of which can be of industry-wide significance. The efficacy of its enforcement mechanisms becomes one measure of the success of the Act.
The Court of Appeals in this case relied upon two of its earlier decisions, Johnson v. Honeywell Information Systems, Inc., 955 F. 2d 409 (CA6 1992); Milligan-Jensen v. Michigan Technological Univ., 975 F. 2d 302 (CA6 1992), and the opinion of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Summers v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Ins. Co., 864 F. 2d 700 (1988). Consulting those authorities, it declared that it had "firmly endorsed the principle that after-acquired evidence is a complete bar to any recovery by the former employee where the employer can show it would have fired the employee on the basis of the evidence." 9 F. 3d, at 542. Summers, in turn, relied upon our decision in Mt. Healthy City Bd. of Ed. v. Doyle, 429 U. S. 274 (1977), but that decision is inapplicable here.
In Mt. Healthy we addressed a mixed-motives case, in which two motives were said to be operative in the employer's decision to fire an employee. One was lawful, the other (an alleged constitutional violation) unlawful. We held that if the lawful reason alone would have sufficed to justify the firing, the employee could not prevail in a suit against the employer. The case was controlled by the difficulty, and what we thought was the lack of necessity, of disentangling the proper motive from the improper one where both played a part in the termination and the former motive would suffice to sustain the employer's action. Id., at 284-287.
That is not the problem confronted here. As we have said, the case comes to us on the express assumption that an unlawful motive was the sole basis for the firing. McKennon's misconduct was not discovered until after she had been
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