Supreme Court Lets Stand Vaccine Mandate Title VII Loss As Gorsuch Dissent Warns On State-Law Defense

What happened

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Doe v. Hochul on Monday, leaving in place a Second Circuit ruling against New York healthcare workers who said they were fired for refusing COVID-19 vaccination on religious grounds.

Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented from the denial of certiorari, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, saying the case raised an important recurring question about the relationship between state mandates and federal civil rights protections.

The dispute arose after New York retained a medical exemption to its healthcare-worker vaccine mandate but eliminated a religious exemption. According to the dissent, New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System had previously accommodated John Doe 2’s religious objection to vaccination, then fired him after he declined COVID-19 vaccination and proposed weekly testing and full masking.

The healthcare workers sued under Title VII after losing their jobs. Gorsuch said the Second Circuit accepted that they had plausibly alleged a prima facie case of religious discrimination, but still held the employers had established undue hardship as a matter of law because granting the requested accommodations would have required violating New York’s vaccine regulation.

Gorsuch said he had “serious doubts” about that rule. In his view, federal civil rights statutes can preempt contrary state law, and “state law cannot control whether an employer faces an “undue hardship”” under federal antidiscrimination law.

The dissent also pointed to later Second Circuit authority and decisions from other circuits as signs that the issue is not confined to the pandemic or to one case. Left uncorrected, Gorsuch wrote, the rule would mean federal civil rights protected by Title VII could give way whenever a contrary state law, even an unconstitutional one, is in play.

Because the court denied certiorari, the justices did not resolve the Title VII question on the merits. The immediate effect is that the Second Circuit’s judgment remains intact, while the broader undue-hardship issue remains open for future cases.