Abstract
When Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, it envisioned a unique dispute resolution mechanism within the statute—the interactive process. Under this process, when an employee requests an accommodation from an employer, the two must “work together to assess whether an employee’s disability can be reasonably accommodated.” Although the term “interactive process” does not appear in the ADA’s text, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) interpreted Congress’s intent and incorporated the interactive process into its regulations to guide disability accommodations. Strangely though, Title VII, which governs religious accommodations, does not include the interactive process in its text or in its EEOC regulations. As a result, while courts have uniformly required the interactive process in ADA accommodations, they have largely refrained from doing so in Title VII accommodations, creating a gap between the statutes. This Note argues that Congress should fill the gap by amending Title VII to include an interactive process for religious accommodations. This argument is especially salient given Congress’s passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) in 2022, which requires the interactive process in pregnancy-related accommodations, and the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Groff v. DeJoy, which significantly narrowed the gap between Title VII and ADA accommodation standards.
Recommended Citation
M. Thomas Yang,
Unreasonable Accommodations: Staple v. School Board of Broward County and the Case for the Interactive Process in Title VII Accommodations,
91 Mo. L. Rev.
(2026)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol91/iss1/14