Published May 26, 2026
On May 26, 2026, EPPC scholar Rachel N. Morrison filed an amicus brief in Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue urging the Supreme Court to hear a case involving whether Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue (SRFR) lawfully denied eight SRFR firefighters religious accommodations to its COVID-19 vaccination policy.
SRFR claimed the religious accommodations would pose an undue hardship on the fire district. The firefighters disagreed. Instead of allowing a jury to decide this factual dispute, the Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for SRFR, crediting the fire district’s claimed reasonable concerns of undue hardship.
The brief, filed on behalf of Morrison and former EEOC General Counsel Sharon Fast Gustafson as experts in religion-related employment discrimination, explained Title VII’s religious discrimination, accommodation, and undue hardships standards and how the reasonable-concern-of-hardship rule departs from those legal standards.
As summarized in the brief:
Under Title VII, when a workplace policy violates an employee’s sincerely held religious belief, an employer must reasonably accommodate the employee’s religious observance or practice if it can do so without undue hardship to the employer’s business. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—the federal agency tasked with enforcing Title VII—has set out what is required of a religious accommodation, explaining that an employer has the “burden of persuasion” to “demonstrate[]” that an accommodation would “in fact” create an “actual” undue hardship. As this Court clarified in Groff v. DeJoy, undue hardship means “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
Nevertheless, post-Groff and contrary to at least three circuit courts, the Ninth Circuit along with two other circuit courts, have adopted a reasonable-concern-of-hardship rule. And the Ninth Circuit’s decision below in Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue is already being relied on to resolve other undue hardship disputes on summary judgment. Such a rule undermines Title VII’s religious accommodation protections for employees and this Court’s clarification of the undue hardship standard in Groff.
The brief urged the Court to hear the case “to correct this harm and restore Title VII’s religious accommodation protections to the firefighters and other employees.”
Rachel N. Morrison is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project, which advocates for an authentic understanding of the human person in the drafting, implementation, and rollback of government regulations.
