The U.S. Department of Justice can't set a six-year deadline for federal workers to sue their employer for Title VII violations, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has ruled.

The court lifted that issue from the outskirts of the case—which was filed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by an Indian doctor who had claimed that he was fired by the Bureau of Prisons based on his race—because it raised an important point about the intersection of two statutory provisions: Title VII and a section of the U.S. Code that bars civil actions against the federal government after six years have passed from the time the claim starts to accrue.

The specificity of the standards for filing a claim set forth in Title VII trump the more general rules set out in Section 2401 of Title 28 of the U.S. Code, Judge Marjorie O. Rendell said on behalf of the three-judge panel that decided the case.