There’s A[nother] New Accommodation Standard in Town: Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects De Minimis Cost Test for Title VII Religious Accommodations, and Confirms Limitations on Coworker Impact Evidence in Undue Hardship Analysis

As we wrote earlier this year, the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider a case challenging the standard by which an employer may refuse to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs.  Since the Court’s 1977 decision in Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison, many lower courts have held that employers could deny a requested religious accommodation if providing it would result in “more than a de minimis cost.”  For years, critics have argued that the de minimis cost test does not appear anywhere in the language of Title VII, and effectively eliminates the statute’s protections against religious discrimination.  On June 29, 2023, a unanimous Supreme Court agreed.

LEGAL 101: The Standard for Title VII Religious Accommodations May Be Changing, and Every Employer Should be Paying Attention

It’s no secret that the current majority on the United States Supreme Court is focused on expanding certain religious liberties.

In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court significantly expanded religious freedoms in the First Amendment context when it held that a school district could not discipline a football coach for publicly engaging in prayer on the football field immediately after games.  The Court’s opinion rejected decades’ worth of cases that had attempted to balance the competing rights secured by the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause, and also demonstrated the majority’s willingness to cherry-pick the facts of a case when analyzing religious freedoms.