Short Circuit 382 | Beard Law

Who doesn’t love a nice beard? It seems the firefighters in Atlantic City. One of their employees wants to wear a beard because of his religion. He doesn’t actually fight fires as part of his job, but there’s a possibility he’d be told he needs to and therefore he supposedly can’t have a beard because his special air mask wouldn’t fit. Does this violate the First Amendment’s protection of free exercise? Matt Liles of IJ reports on this case from the Third Circuit that digs into how “generally applicable” a law must be to not target someone’s religious practice. Then IJ’s Bob McNamara discusses a scary subject: statutes of limitations. Blowing one is every litigator’s nightmare. But which statute of limitations applies in a given case? For claims brought under Title IX, a federal ban on sex discrimination, that’s unclear. Bob breaks down a Fourth Circuit opinion that had to figure out what South Carolina law applies to Title IX claims in a case where a high schooler sued a school for not stopping sexual harassment. Is it a special state law on suing governmental entities? Or is it the most general state statute of limitations? Bob tells us the answer but also advises that this would all be a lot easier if Congress did its job and provided its own statute of limitations. Smith v. Atlantic City E.R. v. Beaufort County School Dist. Employment Division v. Smith Pogonologia