Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal

These proceedings contain two separate panels.  The first panel, moderated by Professor William P. Marshall of the University of North Carolina College of Law focused on issues of religion in the private sector workplace.  Professor Roberto L. Corrada of the University of Denver College of Law focused on the limits of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's requirement that employers provide reasonable accommodations for employees' religious practices and how the proposed Workplace Religious Freedom Act would expand statutory protection.  He analyzed the constitutionality of the proposed legislation, including whether it would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the constitutional basis for the legislation and whether it would unconstitutionally infringe on state governments' sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment.  Professor Michael W. McConnell of the University of Utah College of Law focused on three issues: whether the extension of harassment law to religious harassment may turn workplaces into "religion-free zones," and thereby be counter-productive to Title VII's vision that employees not be forced by their jobs to confine their religious practices to their private lives; whether Title VII should preclude employers from making their businesses be part of their religious expression; and whether statutory requirements that employers make more than minor accommodations of employee religious practices shift costs from employees to employers in ways that create constitutional problems.  Professor Joanne C. Brant of Ohio Northern University, Pettit College of Law, and Professor Robert W. Tuttle of George Washington University Law School focused on discrimination by religious employers, including the statutory and judicially created exemptions from Title VII; 

The second panel, moderated by Professor Ira C. Lupu of George Washington University Law School, focused on religion in the public sector workplace and on religious harassment.  Professor Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of Southern California Law School and Professor Lisa Schultz Bressman of Vanderbilt University Law School focused on President Clinton's Guidelines on Religious Exercise and Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace.  Professor Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas School of Law focused on tensions between regulation of workplace  religious harassment and the First Amendment.  Professor Vicki Schultz of Yale Law School focused on the need to ground the theory of workplace harassment in a broader underlying theory of Title VII's goal of eliminating barriers that exclude members of protected classes from particular jobs and, thereby promote the integration of diverse people in society.