Savannah, Mo. ? Three years after she was fired for refusing to work on Sundays, Connie Rehm has won back her job on the staff of this small town’s public library, and her employers have received a costly education in employment rights law.

No less a legal team than the same Florida attorneys who represented the parents of Terri Schiavo – the brain-damaged woman at the center of last year’s right-to-die case – took up Rehm’s cause, suing Rolling Hills Consolidated Library on a claim of religious discrimination.

A federal jury found in her favor after a three-day trial in May, and last month she was reinstated on a judge’s order to the staff assistant job she had held for 12 years before her religious practice and the library’s adoption of Sunday hours collided in 2003.

Major victory

To Rehm, a 54-year-old former junior high school math teacher who still attends the Lutheran church where she and her husband were married 34 years ago, the outcome of her case is a victory for any employee whose conviction against laboring on the Sabbath is tested by workplace demands.

“A middle American, mild-mannered, small-town library person – I attribute to the Lord a great sense of humor for having picked me for this test,” Rehm mused in an interview at her home in rural Savannah, a northwest Missouri town of 4,900.

The jury awarded Rehm $53,712 in damages, representing her lost library earnings minus what she earned at other jobs after being fired. But the real prize was recovering the job she considers “a gift from God” because it allows her to serve her community.

“One of the unique elements of this case is that Connie wasn’t interested in money, she wanted her job back. That’s an uncommon situation,” said her lead attorney, David C. Gibbs III of the Seminole, Fla.-based Gibbs Law Firm P.A., which takes cases like Rehm’s for the Christian Law Assn.

The library’s position in settlement negotiations was “to deal with it as a financial matter,” essentially paying to make Rehm and her claim go away, Gibbs said.

Rehm wasn’t interested. She saw no reason for abandoning either her beloved second career or – as federal law phrases it – her “sincerely held religious belief” in abstaining from work on Sundays.

“What price is my religious freedom? What is it worth?” Rehm said. “It’s not a matter of displaying the 10 Commandments. It’s being able to live the 10 Commandments, and that’s what my employer was asking me not to do.”

Rare case

Although inching ever higher, claims of religious discrimination remain only a tiny segment – just 3.1 percent – of the slightly more than 75,000 complaints filed last year with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

The agency is a sort of legal gatekeeper, weeding out patently baseless claims and seeking to resolve those that present genuine violations of the Civil Rights Act.

Rarer still are the religious discrimination cases that wind up in a courtroom. When, as in Rehm’s case, the EEOC determines that a violation did occur, both sides typically prefer settlement to arguing their positions before that most unpredictable of assemblies, a jury.

“As a plaintiff in a trial, you run the risk of no recovery,” Gibbs said. “As a defendant, you run the risk of being found liable and having to pay damages.”

Legal fees

The damages, however, may be just part of the cost. The defending party must pay its own attorneys, and may also be ordered by the judge to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees.

In three motions now pending before U.S. Magistrate Judge John T. Maughmer, Gibbs’ attorneys are seeking nearly $300,000 for their work representing Rehm, who found the Florida firm online after a library patron suggested her firing may have been illegal.

The library district’s attorneys are fighting what they call the “astonishing” amount sought by Gibbs’ firm. In court documents, the defense says there was no need for Rehm to hire lawyers from Florida, whose travel to and from Missouri is included in their proposed fees.

How much, if any, to award in legal fees will be decided by the judge.

But professor Paul Secunda, who teaches at the University of Mississippi School of Law and co-edits a blog on labor law, notes that courts have held that plaintiffs “are entitled to their choice of counsel, especially if it’s a specialized area.”

“If you lose to that attorney, you generally have to pay what that attorney is worth,” Secunda said.

Religious discrimination may be a specialized area only because such cases are uncommon, and not often won.

But it’s unlikely to remain a small area much longer, said St. Louis attorney Jim Paul, chairman of the Missouri Bar’s Labor and Employment Law Committee.

“Religious discrimination claims are definitely a new hot topic,” Paul said. “A lot of companies and organizations are now operating longer hours and more days a week, so inevitably you’re crossing paths with other parts of people’s lives, including religious practices and observances.”