ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

The New Jersey Supreme Court delved into workplace discrimination based on religion in a current case involving a police officer who charged his subordinates and fellow officers with degrading his Jewish faith. In a unanimous ruling issued last week, the New Jersey high court ruled that Jason Cutler, an officer with the Haddonfield Police Department, had proved that his rights under the state’s Law Against Discrimination (LAD) had been violated by his superiors and co-workers.

For the first time, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a person bringing a claim of workplace discrimination based on religion does not have a higher burden of proof than those charging discrimination based on gender or race. “Consistent with this state’s strong policy against any form of discrimination in the workplace, we hold that the threshold for demonstrating a religion-based, discriminatory hostile work environment cannot be higher or more stringent than the threshold that applies to sexually or racially hostile workplace environment claims,” Justice Jaynee LaVecchia wrote for the court in Cutler v. Dorn. Cutler sued the police department after discriminatory comments about his religion became unbearable.

A supervisor, on more than one occasion, referred to Cutler as “the Jew” and was asked “where [his] big Jew … nose was.” Additionally, Cutler overheard a fellow patrolman refer to “Those dirty Jews.” The New Jersey court concluded that those and other remarks and actions by Cutler’s superiors “demonstrated an anti-Semitic bigotry that has no place in a workplace of this state.”