The legislature in New Jersey in the 1940s passed a law called “The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination” and it’s really a broad and sweeping law that protects individuals from all types of discrimination. And it’s a very unique statute in that it affords very, very broad protections that other states don’t afford their citizens and the Federal law doesn’t afford citizens.
So the law against discrimination prevents or prohibits discriminations on the basis of gender, race, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, handicap or disability; and what we’re really talking about is employers are prohibited from taking what’s called an adverse employment action against an employee based on one of these characteristics.
You can’t be fired at your job because you are of a certain religious persuasion. You can’t be disciplined at your job because you are gay. If you have a handicap or a disability an employer has to work with you to see if they can afford something called a reasonable accommodation to help you do your job with your disability. They can’t throw their hands up and say, “Joe is disabled, he can’t work here, here’s the door”. So these are just some types of discrimination that this great law prohibits. And it’s something that not a lot of people out there in New Jersey know about.
So at O’Connor, Parsons, Lane & Noble this is a something we are very familiar with and we use this law to get the maximum recovery for our clients.