Publication Date
1-1-2009
Document Type
Article
Organizational Units
Sturm College of Law
Keywords
Title VII, Religious belief, Accommodation, Disparate treatment, Discrimination, Civil rights, Employment discrimination, Workplace equality
Abstract
This Article proposes that courts follow a new, integrated disparate treatment and accommodation framework for all Title VII religion claims. The integrated framework requires employees to show: (1) the employee had a sincerely held religious belief or practice that may or may not have conflicted with a work requirement; (2) the employer knew of the employee's belief; and (3) the employee was subjected to an adverse employment action. The burden would then shift to the employer to show (1) the employer was neutral, and not intentionally biased toward employee's religion in the workplace, by articulating its reasons for acting, which can be subjected to a pretext attack by the employee; and (2) the employer proffered a reasonable accommodation or else established that undue hardship prevented it from doing so.
Integrating Title VII religion case frameworks for disparate treatment and accommodation cases would help to ensure that religion cases are not unnecessarily pigeonholed into one framework, possibly allowing courts or factfinders to overlook evidence of religious bias that may not be apparent under a single framework analysis. The new neutrality prong would force judges and juries to independently, and seriously, analyze the bias evidence in any religion case regardless of whether they truly believed the case to be about accommodation. The framework also would protect against constrained classification judgments by the parties themselves by forcing both plaintiffs and defendants to think seriously about whether bias clouded employer judgments regarding accommodation. Moreover, a single framework would avoid the temptation for judges or attorneys to "borrow" pieces of other existing frameworks for purposes of either defense or analysis. The extra neutrality step in an integrated, single framework for all Title VII religion cases should lead to the greater possibility of justice in mixed accommodation and discrimination cases.
Rights Holder
Roberto L. Corrada, University of Cincinnati Law Review
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
30 pgs
File Size
1.8 MB
Publication Statement
Copyright held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
This article was originally published as Roberto L. Corrada, Toward an Integrated Disparate Treatment and Accommodation Framework for Title VII Religion Cases, 77 U. Cin. L. Rev. 1411 (2009).
Volume
77
First Page
1411
Last Page
1439
Recommended Citation
Roberto L. Corrada, Toward an Integrated Disparate Treatment and Accommodation Framework for Title VII Religion Cases, 77 U. Cin. L. Rev. 1411 (2009).