We have written six pieces about weight discrimination bills: which ones exist, which ones are stuck, which ones died in committee. Not one about what happens after somebody actually files.
That gap matters, because a bill and a case answer different questions. A bill tells you what the law says. A case tells you what the law does. So here are three proceedings, read in the courts’ and the agency’s own documents, each taking a different legal route, each followed to whatever endpoint it reached. Two of them are over. One is not, and that turns out to be the most useful part.
Route one: the city ordinance
Harris v City of New York, Supreme Court, New York County, Index No. 156195/2024, decision of 19 March 2025 (2025 NY Slip Op 25067, Kingo, J.).
Angela Harris passed New York City civil service exam number 3037 for probation officer in 2022 and was placed sixty-third on the list. On 8 May 2024 she appeared for the medical review the city requires, conducted by an NYPD surgeon. According to her amended complaint, she was told at the end of it to “leave and only return after losing 95 LBS,” and was handed a pre-printed form, “NYPD Notice of Medical Review Status PD 407-123,” with a blank line reading “must return to be reweighed after losing ____ LBS.”
She sued on 8 July 2024. Her legal basis is a municipal one: since Local Law 61 of 2023 took effect on 26 November 2023, the New York City Human Rights Law lists height and weight among the protected characteristics, alongside race, religion and the rest. Weight is the protected thing itself. Nobody has to convert it into anything else first.
The city moved to dismiss. On 19 March 2025 the court denied the motion. The reasoning is worth quoting in outline because it is the first of its kind: the court noted that “given the novelty of the law, the pleading standard for weight discrimination under the NYCHRL presents a matter of first impression,” and then borrowed the standard used for the older protected classes. Being told to come back ninety-five pounds lighter, plus a form recording a current weight and a target, was held sufficient to raise an inference of discrimination, and, if substantiated, capable of amounting to direct evidence. The court also let a retaliation claim proceed: the NYPD stopped answering after her lawyer mentioned the lawsuit.
One detail from the opinion’s own footnotes says more about the terrain than the holding does. The city argued she had misled the court by not pleading her weight, and put the number into its own papers to make the point, after she had redacted it from her exhibits. The court’s response was that whether she “would still be considered overweight” is only relevant if weight was a factor in the decision, which was the city’s own position to disprove.
Now the part that gets left out of every summary of this case. Nothing was decided. A denied motion to dismiss means the complaint may proceed; the court said so itself, citing the rule that “whether a plaintiff can ultimately establish its allegations is not part of the calculus.” The same order sent the parties to a settlement conference on 23 April 2025.
What happened after that, we could not establish. Checked on 2 September 2026: no later decision in this case appears in the New York Official Reports, and the state’s public docket portal was behind an access check we do not attempt to get past. So the honest status, twenty-six months after filing, is: open, or resolved quietly. We are not going to guess which.
Route two: the federal detour, and why it usually fails
Morriss v BNSF Railway Co., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, No. 14-3858, decided 5 April 2016.
Melvin Morriss applied for a machinist job with BNSF in March 2011 and got a conditional offer, subject to a medical review because the position was safety-sensitive. BNSF had a written rule: no new hires into safety-sensitive positions with a body mass index of 40 or above. Two company examinations put him just over that line, and the offer was withdrawn. The company’s email said he was not qualified “due to significant health and safety risks associated with Class 3 obesity.”
There is no weight provision in federal law, so he sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act, filing in January 2013. That is the detour: to get in the door, you have to argue your body is a disability.
He lost, and the reason is the whole point. The Eighth Circuit held that for obesity to count as a physical impairment under the ADA, “it must result from an underlying physiological disorder or condition.” Morriss had told BNSF on its own questionnaire that his health was good and that he had no limitations; his own doctor confirmed it. Under the court’s reading, that honesty was fatal. The court also rejected the “regarded as” argument with a sentence worth reading twice: the ADA does not prohibit an employer “from acting on its assessment that although no physical impairment currently exists, there is an unacceptable risk of a future physical impairment.” Being refused work over what your body might become one day is, on that reading, lawful.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed as a friend of the court on Morriss’s side and lost too; the panel held the agency’s litigating position was not entitled to deference. Endpoint: summary judgment for the employer, affirmed. Roughly five years from the withdrawn offer.
Route three: the same detour, a different circuit, and a plaque
EEOC v Resources for Human Development, Inc., No. 2:10-cv-03322, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
Lisa Harrison worked as a prevention and intervention specialist at a residential treatment facility for eight years, from 1999 until she was fired in September 2007. The EEOC brought suit in September 2010, charging that she was fired because of her severe obesity although she could do her job.
In December 2011 the district court denied the employer’s summary judgment motions and held the opposite of what the Eighth Circuit would hold four years later: severe obesity is an impairment under the ADA, and it may qualify regardless of whether a physiological disorder caused it. Same federal statute, opposite answer, different courthouse.
A court-approved consent decree was entered on 10 April 2012. The employer paid $125,000, agreed to annual disability-law training for HR staff and corporate directors across its programmes, and to report every disability complaint to the EEOC for three years. It also named a children’s room after Harrison and installed a memorial plaque.
The plaque is not sentiment. It is the endpoint. Harrison died before the EEOC filed the suit. The money went to her estate.
What the three cases add up to
The route decides the case, more than the facts do. Harris did not have to explain her body to anybody; the ordinance names weight, so the argument is about the employer’s conduct. Morriss and Harrison had to be medically re-described before the law would look at them at all, and whether that worked depended on which federal circuit they were in.
The second thing is duration. Filing is the start of a multi-year process, not a result: roughly five years to a final answer for Morriss, four and a half from firing to decree for Harrison, and twenty-six months and counting with no public resolution for Harris.
The third is how new all of this still is. Michigan has listed weight in its civil rights act since 1976. New York City added it in 2023. And in 2025 a court asked how such a claim should be pleaded had to answer it as a matter of first impression, because nobody had written that down yet.
For the current state of the statutes behind these routes, see our reference page on weight discrimination laws, the Washington case where the protection comes from a court and not a legislature, and the cornerstone on weight discrimination.
This is reporting on how three proceedings ran. It is not legal advice, and nothing here is an assessment of anyone’s prospects in any case.