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The Curious Case Of Bobby Brown v. F.L. Roberts

By John P. McLafferty
July 28, 2009

In fiscal year 2008, the EEOC received 2,880 complaints of religious discrimination, up from 1,786 complaints received in 1998. See http://www.eeoc.gov/stats/religion.html. In response to the substantial increase in religious discrimination claims, in July 2008 the EEOC revised its Compliance Manual and published Questions and Answers (http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/qanda_religion.html) and Best Practices (http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/best_practices_religion.html) to address religious discrimination in the workplace, including guidance on employers' obligations to provide reasonable accommodations of employees' religious practices. Compliance with federal law, however, is not enough to avoid liability. Two recent decisions from the state and federal courts in Massachusetts underscore the potential tensions between federal and state approaches to accommodating religion in the workplace.

Brown v. F.L. Roberts & Co., Inc.

In Brown v. F.L. Roberts & Co., Inc., 452 Mass. 674 (2008), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected an employer's argument that an employee's requested exemption on religious grounds from the employer's personal appearance policy constituted an undue hardship under Massachusetts state law. Two years earlier, in Brown v. F.L. Roberts & Co., 419 F. Supp. 2d 7 (D. Mass. 2006), a federal court judge, considering the same facts involving the same parties, reached the opposite conclusion, holding that under Title VII, the same requested exemption constituted an undue hardship as a matter of law. These two cases demonstrate the need to assess both state and federal law critically when entering into the thicket of considering and implementing reasonable accommodations.

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