In a decision lauded by Haredi advocacy group Agudath Israel, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled last month that a Catholic school was within its rights as a religious institution to fire an employee for becoming pregnant outside of marriage. Former employee Victoria Crisitello sued the St. Theresa School, alleging discrimination after the school fired her for violating its religious principles.

The court ruled unanimously that New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination actually protects the school, and not Crisitello, because of an exception in the law, which allows religious institutions to use tenets of their faith “in establishing and utilizing criteria for employment.” New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination, as with many state and local anti-discrimination laws, provides greater protections than federal law, but the New Jersey law’s stance on situations like Crisitello was unclear until this ruling.

The director of the Agudah’s New Jersey office, Rabbi Avi Schnall, said the decision frees religious institutions in the state to shelter students from “adverse influences.” Other organizations that sided with St. Theresa included the New Jersey Catholic Conference, while a range of civil liberties organizations filed briefs on behalf of Crisitello, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Women’s Law Center.

Michael Helfand, a professor at Pepperdine University’s Caruso School of Law, told Shtetl that the court opted for the literal interpretation of the law’s religious institutions clause, which had previously been seen as somewhat ambiguous.

“New Jersey law itself appears to say that a religious school is allowed to follow the tenets of its religion in the hiring and firing of employees,” Helfand said. “The question is what exactly does that sentence in the statute mean.”

“It was ambiguous previously,” but in this ruling, Helfand said, the court opened the door for New Jersey’s religious institutions to discriminate against employees, so long as “the employer is following the tenets of a religion and establishing rules and criteria based on those tenets.”

Daniel Kaminetski, Agudath Israel of America’s general counsel, said that the ruling will allow religious schools in New Jersey to ensure their students are surrounded by people who share the institution’s values.

“Teachers serve as role models for children and it is entirely appropriate for religious schools to insist that they conduct themselves in ways that comport with religious standards,” Kaminetski said in a statement published on Agudath Israel’s website. “It would be highly improper for government to interfere with a religious school’s decision to terminate a non-compliant teacher’s employment.”

Alexander Shalom, director of Supreme Court advocacy for the ACLU of New Jersey, said the Law Against Discrimination should have protected Crisitello.

“We’re disappointed by the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision today,” Shalom said in a statement. “While we recognize that the United States Supreme Court’s prior decisions provide broad latitude to religious employers regarding hiring and firing, we believe the NJ Supreme Court could have, and should have, held that a second grade art teacher was entitled to the protections of the Law Against Discrimination.”

According to Caroline Mala Corbin, a professor of the University of Miami School of Law, the ruling risks having religious tenets enforced in a discriminatory way, even if they aren’t discriminatory on the surface.

“Even if it’s true she was fired for violating a tenet, there might still be sex discrimination if they’re holding only unmarried women and not unmarried men to that standard,” Corbin said. “And it would not be surprising if it were enforced in a sexually discriminatory manner, and it’s not clear to me that the court took that into consideration.”

The case was initially heard in 2014, when a lower court initially ruled in favor of St. Theresa. The ruling was reversed upon appeal before being taken to the state’s Supreme Court.

The case cannot be appealed further since it deals with a question of how to interpret state law, according to Helfand. Unless the law itself is changed, the decision promises to have a number of implications for Jewish schools and other religious institutions across the state, Helfand said.