Like many private employers, the J.M. Smucker Company required its employees to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Some of Smucker's employees did not like this policy, believed Smucker should have allowed for a broader religious exemption for the requirement, and filed suit. The problem with their suit, however, is they sought to raise constitutional claims against J.M. Smucker, and Smucker is not a state actor.
Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit wrote for a unanimous panel in Ciraci v. J.M. Smucker Co. His opinion begins:
Four employees of the J.M. Smucker Company sought religious exemptions from the company's vaccine requirements. When the company refused, they filed this free exercise claim under the First Amendment against Smucker's. Constitutional guarantees conventionally apply only to entities that exercise sovereign power, such as federal, state, or local governments, and, in some other instances, tribal governments. Smucker's may be a big company. But it is not a sovereign. Even so, did Smucker's become a federal actor—did it exercise sovereign power?—for purposes of this free-exercise claim when it sold products to the federal government and when it imposed the vaccine mandate because the federal government required it to do so as a federal contractor? No, as the district court correctly held.
