The Ninth Circuit’s BART vaccine mandate ruling has affirmed a jury verdict of $7,824,580 in favour of six former transit workers who were dismissed for declining the agency’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement on religious grounds, holding that San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District failed to demonstrate that accommodating the employees would have imposed an undue hardship under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964.
The opinion was written by Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson, joined by Circuit Judges Johnnie Rawlinson and Bridget Bade. The consolidated appeals (docket numbers 25-618, 25-619, and 25-740) arose from three district court proceedings in the Northern District of California bearing docket numbers 3:22-cv-06119-WHA, 3:22-cv-09193-WHA, and 3:22-cv-07720-WHA.
The Undue Hardship Standard After Groff v. DeJoy
The legal pivot point is the Supreme Court of the United States’ unanimous decision in Groff v. DeJoy, handed down on 29 June 2023. Writing for the Court, Justice Samuel Alito rejected the longstanding ‘de minimis cost’ standard from Trans World Airlines v. Hardison (1977) and held that undue hardship under Title VII is established only when a burden is ‘substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business.’ The Groff v. DeJoy opinion specifically requires ‘substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.’
BART argued that any accommodation carrying an increased safety risk constitutes undue hardship as a matter of law. The Ninth Circuit rejected that proposition, applying Groff‘s framework: the burden must be ‘substantial,’ ‘excessive,’ or ‘unjustifiable,’ and safety risks, like other categories of risk, are capable of justification. As the panel observed, ‘because few, if any, activities in life are risk free, [we] do not ask whether a risk exists, but whether it is significant.’
Why the BART Vaccine Mandate Ruling Diverges from Earlier COVID Cases
BART relied on two litigation experts, an infectious disease epidemiologist and an industrial hygienist, to establish the public health justification for its policy. The panel found that reliance insufficient: the public health guidance BART’s pandemic task force had actually consulted was not placed in evidence, and the jury was not obliged to treat expert testimony as conclusive. Crucially, the agency presented no percipient witnesses from that task force.
The court contrasted BART’s position with two prior decisions. In Petersen, eight firefighters were denied religious exemptions; the panel had upheld that outcome because firefighters work constantly in group settings, and the fire department faced the prospect of losing almost a quarter of its firefighting force to illness and forfeiting a $400,000 annual contract. In Williams, nine frontline hospital workers faced a similar rejection, the healthcare defendant’s core business being the delivery of safe medical care requiring close patient contact.
BART’s business is transportation, not health or emergency services. The panel set out the specific working conditions of each of the six plaintiffs in detail. Lead plaintiff Tonya Lewis-Williams, who had worked for BART for 16 years before her dismissal, was a utility worker who spent most of her time alone cleaning platforms and offices. Computer electronic technician Szu-Cheng Sun testified that 90 per cent of his work could be done alone or remotely. Storekeeper Ryan Rivera worked from an isolated office with its own ventilation system. The remaining three plaintiffs, rolling stock superintendent Bradford Mitchell, customer service clerk Rosalind Parker, and operations supervisor liaison Raymond Lockett, each performed roles that kept them largely apart from the public and colleagues.
The panel also noted that BART had received millions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds, from which a jury could reasonably infer the agency had the resources and excess workforce to absorb any additional operational burden without mass redundancies. The employees who lost their positions were the religious dissenters BART declined to accommodate.
All six plaintiffs are Christians, according to KTVU. It was undisputed at trial that each had established a prima facie case that BART failed to accommodate sincere religious objections. BART’s Board of Directors approved the vaccine mandate in 2021, and employees faced termination for non-compliance.
The jury’s October verdict was delivered in two phases: Phase One addressed BART’s undue hardship affirmative defence, and Phase Two addressed damages, with each of the six plaintiffs receiving just over one million dollars, according to reporting on the district court proceedings. U.S. District Judge William A. Alsup denied BART’s post-trial motions in a 30 December 2024 order, including a motion under Rule 59 for a new trial, acknowledging minor imperfections in the trial including flawed jury instructions but determining they were insufficient to invalidate the verdict. His Rule 50(b) analysis, set out in the district court judgment, required denial where the trial evidence admitted of a rational line of reasoning in favour of the verdict under the instructions as given.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed, emphasising that the undue hardship determination is a ‘fact-specific inquiry’ suited to jury resolution and that only where the excessiveness of the burden is ‘so obvious that reasonable minds could not differ’ should a court resolve the question as a matter of law. The panel concluded this was not such a case.
Subject to any onward petition for rehearing or certiorari, BART faces a final liability of $7,824,580. The decision sharpens the circuit’s developing jurisprudence on how Groff‘s ‘substantial burden’ standard applies when employers invoke safety, rather than cost, as the basis for an undue hardship defence, and leaves open how courts will weigh safety arguments in sectors whose core function lies closer to the healthcare and emergency-services end of the spectrum.
