Professor Ann McGinley Leverages Employment Law Background in Recent Scholarship Activities

Ann C. McGinley, Co-Director of the UNLV Workplace Law Program and William S. Boyd Professor of Law, has three scholarship initiatives in the works, beginning with a new casebook. Co-authored by Laura Rothstein and D’Andra Millsap Shu, the upcoming seventh edition of  Disability Law: Cases, Materials, Problems is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the major laws relating to discrimination against individuals with disabilities. Professor McGinley says, “Disability law has gotten more attention lately; students are becoming more interested in studying disability law because it affects many of them personally. Most interesting to me are the changes since the last edition because Covid has had many effects on the law.”

Professor McGinley has recently completed Religious Accommodations in the Dobbs Era for a symposium to be published this year about how the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion has affected the workplace. Her research deals with how the anti-discrimination rights—including an employee’s right to religious accommodations—in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects employees’ anti-abortion speech at work and their refusal to do portions of their jobs that they consider objectionable. She cites, for example, recent cases at CVS’s Minute Clinics and Southwest Airlines. At CVS, nurse practitioners have been fired for refusing to counsel patients about contraceptives that are contrary to the employees’ religious beliefs, while a flight attendant at Southwest was fired for harassing another employee for her pro-abortion political activity. Professor McGinley’s research offers insights into the difficult balance that employers and courts must achieve to protect employers’ and their customers’ interests while respecting employees’ rights.

Her third project is entitled Intersectionality on The Ground, The “Neutral Norm” and Remedying The Gap In Success of Intersectional Claims. This multi-year project analyzes how the law creates barriers to protection against employment discrimination for the most vulnerable individuals who belong to two or more protected classes, and/or whose disfavored working identities are related to protected traits. She plans to suggest changes to how Title VII is interpreted as well as amendments to the statute that would create greater protection for workers who currently suffer from intersectional discrimination.