Federalism, Free Exercise, and Title VII: Reconsidering Reasonable Accommodation

Abstract

Title VII's reasonable-accommodation provision sits at the crossroads of two controversial and evolving Supreme Court doctrines. The first of these doctrines holds that Congress can only abrogate state-sovereign immunity pursuant to legislation that is "congruent and proportional" to the task of safeguarding constitutional rights. The second holds that the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment does not grant a general right to religious accommodation. The combined effect of the Court's recent federalism and free-exercise decisions has been to create considerable uncertainty as to whether Title VII's reasonable-accommodation provision validly abrogates state-sovereign immunity. That uncertainty is exacerbated because the Court has not yet established the precise contours of the congruence-and-proportionality test and has left the door open to free-exercise accommodations in certain, poorly defined circumstances. This article comprehensively discusses the threat to Title VII's reasonable-accommodation provision and contends that the Court should find the provision fully applicable in private actions against state employers. In addition, this article explains how the Court could use a state-employer challenge to Title VII's reasonable-accommodation provision as a vehicle for clarifying the ambiguities that remain in both its federalism and free-exercise doctrines.