In October 2021, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) adopted a policy requiring employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by December 13, 2021, subject to medical or religious exemptions. Employees seeking a religious exemption submitted a standardized questionnaire to BART’s Leave Management Department describing their beliefs and the accommodation sought. Of 181 religious exemption requests, BART found 70 employees eligible for a potential exemption, but concluded that none of the 70 could actually be accommodated without undue hardship to its operations. Those employees were told to get vaccinated or lose their jobs; about half complied, and the remaining 37 resigned, retired, or were terminated. Combined with 36 employees whose exemption requests were denied outright, 73 employees who had sought a religious accommodation lost their positions.
Six of those former employees — Tonya Lewis-Williams, Raymond Lockett, Rosalind Parker, Bradford Mitchell, Ryan Rivera, and Szu-Cheng Sun — ultimately took their claims to trial. Their jobs included a platform utility worker, a train-car maintenance supervisor, a ticket-window clerk behind a bullet-proof partition, a computer technician who said 90 percent of his work could be done alone or remotely, a contractor-escort supervisor who worked mostly outdoors, and a storekeeper who could have worked alone in an isolated, separately ventilated office. None of the six were shown to be in frequent close contact with the public or with co-workers, and BART did not present evidence that any of them were unwilling to mask or take other precautions.
Thirty-five former BART employees originally sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Judge William Alsup), asserting failure-to-accommodate claims under Title VII and California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), plus a First Amendment free-exercise claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The district court granted BART summary judgment on the free-exercise claim and denied the employees summary judgment on their statutory claims. After that ruling, most plaintiffs settled, leaving the six above for trial.
The district court split the case into two phases: whether BART could prove its “undue hardship” defense, and, if not, the remaining liability and damages issues. The jury found BART had not established undue hardship, then awarded the six plaintiffs a combined $7,824,580. BART renewed its motion for judgment as a matter of law and moved in the alternative for a new trial; the district court denied both, and also declined to order reinstatement for one plaintiff, Ryan Rivera, awarding him front pay instead. BART appealed; the employees cross-appealed the summary-judgment ruling on their free-exercise claim, and Rivera separately appealed the reinstatement question.
In the published case of Lewis-Williams, et al. v. San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, Nos. 25-618, 25-619 & 25-740 (9th Cir. Sept. 2026). The Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment in full. It held BART was entitled to neither judgment as a matter of law nor a new trial, and it found Rivera’s front-pay award was not plain error. Because the verdict was affirmed, the panel found the cross-appeal on the free-exercise claim moot and did not decide it. Judge R. Nelson wrote the opinion for a unanimous panel (Judges Rawlinson and Bade joining) and also wrote separately, concurring in the panel’s judgment but writing at length to criticize the district court’s free-exercise analysis and, more broadly, to argue that Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), was wrongly decided.
The panel applied the Title VII/FEHA undue-hardship standard the Supreme Court articulated in Groff v. DeJoy, 600 U.S. 447 (2023): an employer must show the accommodation’s burden would be “substantial,” “excessive,” or “unjustifiable,” not merely somewhat less safe than the challenged requirement. BART argued that because vaccination was the most effective way to limit COVID-19 transmission, any less-effective alternative (masking, distancing, remote work) was unreasonable as a matter of law, and that its reliance on public-health guidance settled the question. The panel rejected that framing. Citing Bragdon v. Abbott, 524 U.S. 624 (1998), it reasoned that public-health guidance is entitled to special weight but is not conclusive, and it noted that BART never introduced the actual guidance it claimed to rely on, instead offering only after-the-fact litigation experts whose testimony the jury was free to weigh rather than accept outright.
The panel distinguished two of its own recent decisions in which similar hardship defenses succeeded, involving firefighters and hospital workers whose jobs required close, continuous contact with the public and colleagues and whose accommodation would have created serious operational and financial risk. BART, by contrast, is a transportation agency, not a health-care provider, and the evidence showed the six employees’ jobs involved little sustained close contact with others. Because the “undue hardship” inquiry is fact-specific and generally suited to jury resolution, and because the record here did not make the outcome obvious as a matter of law, the panel held the jury’s verdict was adequately supported and that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying a new trial, including over a since-cured order-in-limine violation by plaintiffs’ counsel that the court found non-prejudicial.
Judge Nelson’s concurrence went further than the majority opinion needed to. He argued the district court erred in applying an “unfettered discretion” test to conclude BART’s exemption process was a neutral, generally applicable policy not subject to strict scrutiny — a test the Ninth Circuit had already rejected en banc in Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School District Board of Education, 82 F.4th 664 (9th Cir. 2023), applying Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 593 U.S. 522 (2021). Because the panel’s affirmance on the Title VII and FEHA claims mooted the cross-appealed free-exercise issue, this discussion is not part of the court’s binding holding. Judge Nelson used the balance of his concurrence to argue at length, on originalist grounds, that Employment Division v. Smith was wrongly decided and should eventually be overturned, noting that the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in a case, St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy (cert. granted Apr. 20, 2026), that may address related questions about Smith’s “generally applicable” test.