SCOTUS Might Not Raise Religious Discrimination Bar After All

Today the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in a potentially seismic Title VII religious discrimination case, Groff v. DeJoy. Many expected the Court to wipe out decades of precedent which previously made it easy for an employer to prove that a requested religious accommodation  would pose an undue hardship on the employer and, therefore, need not be granted. Under this well-established precedent, an employer could refuse a religious accommodation any time it posed more than a de minimis hardship on the employer. Given the current conservative majority of the court and its supposed focus on religious rights, it seemed all but a given that it would use Groff to hold employers to a new, higher standard when denying requests for religious accommodations under Title VII. 

However, if today's oral argument is any indication of what the Court will do, the de minimis standard could very well survive for another day. Three of the more liberal members of the court focused their questions on whether Congress, rather than the Court, should address the religious accommodation standard. And, two of the more conservative justices focused their attention on whether Groff's accommodation requests posed an undue hardship regardless of the standard. Using the "new math," that would make five of the justices inclined to find in favor of the employer in the case without the need to reverse the decades-old de minimis standard. 

While we try not to read too much in the tea leaves of oral arguments, today's argument suggests at least the possibility that the potential seismic shift will not even jiggle the Richter scale. Stay tuned!