New Jersey: No Adverse Employment Action Required for a Failure to Accommodate Disability Claim

There are plenty of good reasons that plaintiff’s lawyers heart the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (NJLAD). It has a wide scope of coverage for employees with disabilities. It’s remedial purposes are incredibly broad. A plaintiff can go directly to court with a claim under the NJLAD without vetting it with a state administrative agency first. A plaintiff can stay out of federal court where the odds of losing on an employment discrimination case on summary judgment are much higher than they are in state court.

As if the plaintiff’s bar didn’t need any further reasons to love the NJLAD.

Well, here’s one more…

On September 13, 2010, the New Jersey Supreme Court in Victor v. New Jersey, strongly suggested that an employee who claims that his employer failed to accommodate his disability does not need to establish, as part of his failure to accommodate action, that his employer took an adverse employment action against him.

In its opinion, the Court acknowledged that, under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), an employee with a failure to accommodate claim must prove an adverse employment action. Still, the Court reasoned that the NJLAD’s purposes suggest that the Court chart a course to permit plaintiffs to proceed against employers who have failed to