My old law firm, Sidley Austin, has really revived its pro bono religious liberty practice over the past few years — a good bellwether for the openness of the BigLaw climate. They recently won a court victory followed by a favorable settlement in a religious-discrimination case with particularly egregious evidence:

Sidley recently achieved a significant victory on behalf of Chabad Lubavitch of the Beaches, a New York-based religious nonprofit organization. In November 2021, Chabad acquired a long-vacant commercial property to use as a center for Jewish worship, outreach, and education; Chabad celebrated the acquisition in December 2021 by holding a Hanukkah celebration. Within days of the Hanukkah celebration, Village leadership announced plans to seize the property through eminent domain. Sidley secured a federal court injunction halting the attempted taking, with the court noting that the Village’s decision appeared to be “intolerant of Chabad’s members’ religious beliefs.”

Through hard-fought discovery, Sidley obtained evidence of Village leadership’s animus towards Chabad. In private emails and text messages, Village officials freely and frequently engaged in open anti-Chabad and anti-Orthodox sentiment and trafficked in vile antisemitic tropes, including that Orthodox Jews are “buying the world,” “procreate” too much, and “don’t tip.” One senior Village official stated that “most people don’t want the Chabad and just don’t want to say it. Any secular Jew doesn’t want them,” to which the then-Mayor agreed “Very true.” And the Village’s senior land use official privately mused that the Village should “string an Eruv around the village with Xmas lights” to “keep Chabbad [sic] out of the village.”