The just-completed SCOTUS term hardly matches the last one in terms of blockbuster church-and-state decisions. The justices did issue a couple of important rulings, though, one of which suggests they may be rethinking an important element of their anti-discrimination jurisprudence.
The first case is Groff v. DeJoy, which concerns the meaning of a phrase in Title VII, the federal law that prohibits employment discrimination based, among other things, on religion. Title VII provides that an employer must reasonably accommodate an employee's religious practice unless the employer is unable to do so "without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer's business." Decades ago, in TWA v. Hardison (1977), a typically confusing Burger Court opinion, the Court suggested that "undue hardship" means any cost that would be beyond "de minimis." Thus, if accommodating an employee's religious practice would require anything more than a trivial adjustment, the employer would need to do nothing. That's pretty weak tea, especially for an anti-discrimination statute.
In Groff, the Court ruled unanimously that the de minimis standard is not the correct reading of Title VII. True, Hardison used the phrase "de minimis" in describing an employer's obligation, but other language in the decision suggested a stricter standard. In fact, the Groff Court said, the test for "undue hardship" is whether accommodating an employee's religious practice would cause the employer to incur a substantial increased cost in the context of the employer's business. The Court left it for the EEOC (and lower courts) to apply the substantiality test in "a common-sense manner."
