Cite as: 532 U. S. 706 (2001)
Opinion of Stevens, J.
sionals within the Act's protections is effectively nullified.8 See HCR, 511 U. S., at 585 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). In my opinion, the Court's approach does precisely what it accuses the Board of doing—namely, reading one part of the statute to the exclusion of the other.
The Court acknowledges today that deference is appropriate when the Board determines both the degree of discretion required for supervisory status as well as the significance of limitations on the alleged supervisor's discretion imposed by the employer. Thus, in a case like this, a court should not second-guess the Board's evaluation of the authority of the nurses as building supervisors, or of the significance of the employer's definition of that authority.
However, in a tour de force supported by little more than ipse dixit, the Court concludes that no deference is due the Board's evaluation of the "kind of judgment" that professional employees exercise. Ante, at 714 (emphasis deleted). Thus, under the Court's view, it is impermissible for the Board to attach a different weight to a nurse's judgment that an employee should be reassigned or disciplined than to a nurse's judgment that the employee should take a patient's temperature, even if nurses routinely instruct others to take a patient's temperature but do not ordinarily reassign or discipline employees. The Court's approach finds no support in the text of the statute, and is inconsistent with our case law. See, e. g., Yeshiva, 444 U. S., at 690 ("Only if an employ-ee's activities fall outside the scope of the duties routinely
8 Moreover, so broad a reading seems contrary to congressional intent in enacting the supervisory exception. Rather, the definition of "super-visor" was intended to apply only to those employees with "genuine management prerogatives" so that those employees excluded from the Act's coverage would be "truly supervisory." S. Rep. No. 105, 80th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 4, 19 (1947), 1 NLRB, Legislative History of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947, pp. 410, 425 (1948).
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