A federal appeals court upheld a 7.8 million dollar jury verdict for six transit workers fired by the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District after they refused COVID-19 vaccines for religious reasons. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that BART failed to prove accommodating the workers would create an undue hardship, while concurring Judge Ryan D. Nelson argued that the Supreme Court should overturn Employment Division v. Smith. The ruling provides immediate relief to the workers, but the case illustrates how modern battles over workplace mandates are fundamentally shifting religious accommodation away from historic protections of conscience and into disputes over personal medical choices.
Case: Tonya Lewis-Williams et al. v. San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District
Court: United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Decision date: September 11, 2026
Case number: Nos. 25-618, 25-619, and 25-740
Original decision: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Judge William Alsup)
Six transit workers who lost their jobs for refusing COVID-19 vaccines will keep their 7.8 million dollar jury award against the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit held that BART violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because the agency failed to demonstrate that accommodating the employees would impose a substantial, excessive cost. Under the Supreme Court standard in Groff v. DeJoy, employers cannot rely on general claims of safety to deny an accommodation. Because the six employees worked in isolated settings, such as vacant maintenance bays or behind polyglass windows, BART could not show that their presence caused an intolerable workplace hazard.
Concurring Judge Ryan D. Nelson went further, writing a 27-page opinion calling on the Supreme Court to overturn its 1990 precedent in Employment Division v. Smith. Under Smith, neutral laws that apply to everyone do not violate the First Amendment, even if they burden religious practices. Nelson argued that the original meaning of the First and Fourteenth Amendments protected believers from having to obey general laws that violate divine commands, pointing to early American history and Reconstruction debates over the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
Commentary
The legal victory for the BART workers underscores a profound transformation in American religious liberty law that has taken place over the past 5 years. For most of the nation’s history, religious accommodation did not mean dodging public health mandates. Historic religious exemptions centered on core matters of worship, sacred ritual, and non-negotiable spiritual duties. Early Americans fought for exemptions from mandatory military service, church taxes, or courtroom oaths that violated strict biblical commands against swearing. When public health rules like smallpox vaccination arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, courts treated them as universal civic protections rather than religious battlegrounds. The Free Exercise Clause protected the soul, the altar, and the pulpit from state intrusion, not personal medical autonomy from standard civic obligations.
The modern paradigm of using religious accommodation to challenge vaccine mandates chips away at that constitutional foundation. By reframing religious freedom as an individual right to veto workplace health policies, the law turns freedom to practice one’s own faith into a consumer-style personal preference. Historic free exercise protected individuals when the state compelled them to violate clear religious sacraments or forced them to confess secular creeds. Converting this profound shield into a convenient instrument for avoiding vaccine divorces the doctrine from the sacred obligations that gave it unique moral authority in 1791 and 1868.
This is not to say there aren’t personal health reasons and concerns about vaccines, but simply applying a religious concern because there’s a “box for it” on the form misshapes what liberty means for those who have very real practice concerns. I know there are those who will argue that these particular vaccines violate their sincerely held religious beliefs that they suddenly discovered during COVID-19, but it tends to cheapen and call into question the entire range of religious practice that many have fought to protect over the past two-and-a-half centuries. Sure, there’s money to be made and cases to be won now, but what are the long term ramifications of this approach?
This shift also forces government officials into an intrusive role that the First Amendment was designed to prevent. When religious accommodation becomes a tool for personal medical decisions, secular employers and courts must determine who is “truly” religious and who is simply expressing political dissent or personal distrust of medicine. At BART, agency officials conducted interrogations into employee theology, reviewing 181 claims to judge the purity and depth of each person’s doctrine before denying them all. Forcing bureaucrats to sit as religious inquisitors to separate sincere faith from personal bodily preferences degrades both religious integrity and governmental neutrality.
Chipping away at the line between sacred duty and personal medical autonomy ultimately endangers religious liberty itself. When religious exemptions are claimed against general public health measures during an emergency, the broader public begins to see religious liberty not as a vital civil right, but as a loophole for escaping shared civic responsibilities. The Founders recognized that religious exercise must remain distinct from ordinary personal choices precisely so it would command universal respect. Tying the fate of the Free Exercise Clause to pandemic vaccine disputes risks shrinking a sacred constitutional freedom into little more than a contentious political battle over public health.
What happens next?
BART has 14 days from the entry of judgment to petition the Ninth Circuit for a panel rehearing or a rehearing en banc before an eleven-judge panel. If the transit agency does not seek a rehearing, or if the court denies the petition, BART will have 90 days to petition the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. The six workers will not appeal because the Ninth Circuit fully affirmed their monetary judgment.
Sources
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United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Tonya Lewis-Williams, et al. v. San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District. Nos. 25-618, 25-619, 25-740, 11 Sept. 2026.
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Supreme Court of the United States. Groff v. DeJoy. 600 U.S. 447, 2023.
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Supreme Court of the United States. Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith. 494 U.S. 872, 1990.
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Supreme Court of the United States. Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. 593 U.S. 522, 2021.
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United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School District Board of Education. 82 F.4th 664, 2023.
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Lash, Kurt T., and Stephanie Hall Barclay. “A Crust of Bread: Religious Resistance and the Fourteenth Amendment.” Vanderbilt Law Review, vol. 78, 2025, pp. 1203-1264.
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