Supreme Court weighs religious accommodation for Christian postal worker

The Supreme Court on Tuesday debated how far employers must go to accommodate their employees’ religious beliefs as the justices weighed an evangelical Christian’s claims of discrimination while serving as a U.S. Postal Service worker.

Gerald Groff sued the U.S. Postal Service after being disciplined for missing scheduled Sunday shifts to deliver Amazon packages. Groff said working on Sundays violates his religious beliefs to rest during the Sabbath. He opted to resign from his job rather than be fired.

Groff contends that under a federal civil rights law the Postal Service was required to accommodate his religious observance and schedule him for other days of the week, appealing to the justices in the hopes of overturning a 46-year-old precedent that set the standard for such claims and doomed his case in lower courts.

During Tuesday’s oral argument, a number of the justices searched for areas of agreement between Groff’s position and that of the Biden administration, although debate remained as to the exact verbiage the court should use in setting the standard for future religious accommodation claims.

“I’d like to see if there’s some common ground that we can work off of,” said conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against an employee because of their religion, unless the employer can show that they are unable to reasonably accommodate the employee’s observance without “undue hardship.”

In Groff’s case, the Postal Service had not required him to work on Sundays until it contracted with Amazon to deliver packages on that day of the week. 

The postmaster accommodated Groff for some time by either skipping him in the Sunday rotation or automatically scheduling an extra person. The agency later ended the accommodation and instead asked for volunteers in Groff’s place. 

When no one volunteered, Groff still did not show up on Sunday, totaling more than 24 times over two years. He received repeated discipline and later resigned rather than be terminated.

In 1977, the Supreme Court in Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison defined an “undue hardship” as what they called a “more than a de minimis burden.” Under that standard, lower courts had ruled against Groff.

Aaron Streett, Groff’s attorney, urged the justices to explicitly overrule Hardison and establish a new standard that defines undue hardship as a “significant difficulty or expense.” That language would match the accommodation standard under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“I think there’s common ground, too, that ‘de minimis’ can’t be the test in isolation, at least, because Congress doesn’t write civil rights legislation to have de minimis effect, right. We don’t think of the civil rights laws as trifling, which is the definition of de minimis,” Gorsuch said.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, agreed that the de minimis standard doesn’t work in a vacuum and conceded that a “substantial cost” standard would work in theory.

But Prelogar stressed that, although it should be clarified, overruling Hardison would disrupt the decades of case law that has relied upon it. She encouraged the justices to avoid setting a brand new standard in their decision and instead reinforce Hardison.

“Our concern with that is, if the court were to announce a new standard, I think it would come with all the costs of destabilizing this area of the law and unsettling whether the court means to overrule Hardison on its facts, for example, or potentially call into question all of the established areas of law that have developed that we think have drawn the right lines here,” Prelogar said.

Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s conservatives and a fervent supporter of religious rights, said he was “really struck” by Prelogar’s assertion that religious minorities were properly protected under Hardison, referencing a number of amicus briefs submitted by religious groups.

“They all say that that is just not true, and that Hardison has violated their right to religious liberty,” Alito said, appearing to lean toward Groff’s side.

Some of the court’s liberal justices, meanwhile, appeared wary of completely tossing the decades-old decision.

“We’ve said over and over that when there’s a statute involved rather than the Constitution, stare decisis is at its peak,” said liberal Justice Elena Kagan, referring to the legal principle of adhering to the court’s precedents. 

“And this has been — for decades, this has been the rule,” she continued. “Congress has had that opportunity to change it. Congress has not done so.”

“Hardison has been on Congress’s radar screen for a very long time, and they’ve never changed it. And I guess I’m concerned that a person could fail to get in Congress what they want with respect to changing the statutory standard and then just come to the court and say, ‘you give it to us.’ Why shouldn’t we wait for Congress?” probed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.