Background
Timothy Jangl was a social worker for the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. His job required extensive face-to-face contact with children and parents, court personnel, coworkers, and service providers. He visited families at home, supervised parenting time, accompanied children to appointments, and served periodically as the duty worker responsible for emergency home visits and child removals. One child on his caseload had significant medical needs and sometimes required transportation across the State for treatment.
In August 2021, as DCF resumed in-person operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Charles Baker issued Executive Order No. 595 requiring executive-department employees to be vaccinated. The order allowed limited religious exemptions where a reasonable accommodation could be reached. Jangl sought an exemption based on sincerely held religious beliefs and proposed remote work, masking, and weekly testing. DCF denied the request, concluding that those measures would not adequately protect its operations or the vulnerable people it served. Faced with vaccination or termination, Jangl resigned and brought a religious-discrimination claim under G.L. c. 151B, § 4 (1A).
The defendants moved for summary judgment with affidavits addressing the public-health risks of COVID-19 and the operational consequences of permitting an unvaccinated social worker to continue in the role. One came from Dr. Lawrence Madoff, the medical director of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health bureau that administered the State’s COVID-19 vaccination program. Jangl moved to strike that affidavit but offered no expert evidence in response and did not request a Daubert-Lanigan hearing to challenge the reliability of its scientific methodology. The Superior Court accepted the sincerity of his beliefs but entered summary judgment for the defendants on undue-hardship grounds.
The Court’s Holding
The Appeals Court affirmed. Writing for the panel, Justice Smyth concluded first that the motion judge acted within her discretion in admitting Dr. Madoff’s affidavit. His board certification in internal medicine and infectious diseases, academic appointment, and direct experience overseeing the Commonwealth’s infectious-disease work qualified him to address the dangers of COVID-19 and vaccine effectiveness. An expert may rely on scientific studies the expert did not personally conduct. Criticisms that the studies were outdated, incomplete, or insufficiently attentive to contrary evidence went to the testimony’s weight, not its admissibility.
The court also held that Jangl waived a challenge to the reliability of the expert’s methodology by failing to make an express Daubert-Lanigan motion and request a hearing. That preservation rule applies at summary judgment as well as at trial. Merely attacking an expert’s conclusions in a motion to strike does not require a judge to conduct an independent reliability hearing.
On the merits, G.L. c. 151B, § 4 (1A), requires an employer to accommodate religious practice unless the employer proves that accommodation would cause undue hardship in conducting its business. The statute recognizes a compromise of public health or safety as an undue hardship. The undisputed evidence showed that Jangl’s essential duties required close personal contact, including with medically vulnerable children, and emergency field work that could not be performed exclusively from home. An outbreak could also worsen existing staffing shortages and impair DCF’s ability to deliver critical services. Affidavits from public-health and agency officials further established that masking, testing, and telework did not adequately mitigate those risks. Because Jangl supplied no competent countervailing evidence, his assertion that vaccination did not reduce infection or transmission created no genuine factual dispute.
Key Takeaways
- Under G.L. c. 151B, § 4 (1A), a demonstrated threat to public health or safety can by itself make a requested religious accommodation an undue hardship.
- The analysis is job-specific. DCF prevailed with evidence connecting the employee’s in-person and emergency duties, vulnerable clients, staffing constraints, and proposed alternatives to concrete operational risks.
- A party challenging scientific methodology at summary judgment must expressly request a Daubert-Lanigan hearing. General objections to an expert’s sources or conclusions do not preserve that issue.
- Once the moving party supports summary judgment with admissible affidavits, disagreement and unsupported assertions are insufficient; the opponent must produce competent evidence showing a genuine dispute.
Why It Matters
Jangl gives Massachusetts employers and employment lawyers a published appellate application of the Commonwealth’s religious-accommodation statute to a COVID-19 vaccination mandate. The ruling does not establish that vaccination exemptions always create undue hardship. It instead demonstrates how an employer can prevail through evidence tailored to the employee’s actual duties, the people exposed, service-continuity needs, and the comparative limits of proposed alternatives. Public agencies, health-care organizations, universities, and other employers serving vulnerable populations should preserve that contemporaneous, role-specific record.
The decision is equally important for litigators handling expert evidence at summary judgment. A party cannot reserve a methodology challenge for appeal after filing only a motion to strike or debating the persuasiveness of an expert’s conclusions. Counsel seeking exclusion under Massachusetts’s Daubert-Lanigan framework should identify the methodological objection clearly, request the hearing, and submit competing evidence where appropriate. Without that record, even contested scientific questions may be resolved on the movant’s unrebutted proof.