New York City's Body-Size Discrimination Law Has Had Its First Court Test

Angela Harris passed New York City civil service exam number 3037 in 2022 and was placed 63rd on the list of people eligible to be hired as a probation officer. On May 8, 2024, she appeared for the medical review that stands between the exam and the job, and was evaluated by a New York Police Department surgeon. At the end of it, according to the amended complaint she later filed, she was told to "leave and only return after losing '95 LBS'" and handed a preprinted form — "NYPD Notice of Medical Review Status PD 407-123 (Rev. 01-20)" — carrying the line "MUST RETURN TO BE REWEIGHED AFTER LOSING ______ LBS" and a space for her current weight. Ten months later, on March 19, 2025, Justice Hasa A. Kingo of the Supreme Court, New York County, declined to throw her case out. That ruling is not a verdict and it does not find that Harris was discriminated against: a denied motion to dismiss means only that her claims may proceed to be tested against evidence. What it is is the first substantial judicial reading of the newest protected characteristic in the New York City Human Rights Law.

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The provision Harris sued under is Local Law 61 of 2023, which Mayor Eric Adams signed on May 26, 2023, and which both the enforcing agency and the court date as taking effect on November 26, 2023. It added height, weight, and the combination of the two — "body size" — to the characteristics the city's Human Rights Law protects, and it did so across employment, housing, and public accommodations, which means hospitals, gyms, restaurants, and theaters as well as workplaces. Enforcement sits with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which can order a respondent to stop, order a policy rewritten, and order payment for emotional distress, alongside civil penalties of up to $125,000, or up to $250,000 where the conduct was willful, wanton, or malicious. It is the most detailed body-size discrimination provision on the books in any American city — and unlike the state bills this magazine has tracked dying in committee in New Jersey and Massachusetts, it is in force.

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The exceptions are where a law like this usually gets hollowed out, and this one is drawn tightly. In housing there are none at all: the Commission's own guidance states flatly that height, weight, or body size are never permissible criteria there. In employment and public accommodations, a covered entity may consider body size only where doing so is required by federal, state, or local law or regulation, or where the Commission has issued a regulation identifying the job as one whose essential requisites a person's height or weight would prevent them from performing, or where the Commission has identified it as reasonably necessary to normal operations. Note where the statute puts the work. Where no law or regulation requires the criterion, an applicant's ability to perform the essential requisites of the job is an affirmative defense — the employer's to raise and prove. Kingo said so in a footnote: it was never Harris's burden to plead that she could do the job.

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The City's position was that the form recorded a medical determination rather than a discriminatory one. Kingo found that undermined by the document itself and by the City's own briefs. The form "does not contain any statements about a medical diagnosis, let alone a diagnosis for which weight loss might ameliorate a condition," he wrote, and the City's papers cited no diagnosis either, referring to Harris instead, repeatedly, as "overweight" — which the court said "may, in fact, indicate that her employment was denied on the basis of her weight." Nor, the court noted, did the City point to any law or regulation permitting the Department of Probation or the NYPD to consider a probation officer applicant's weight at all. A second claim survived alongside it. Harris alleged that after her attorney told an NYPD investigator she had sued, the department stopped communicating and never rescheduled the appointment it had asked her to attend — enough, the court held, to plead retaliation.

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For someone who lives in, works in, or visits New York City, the route this law creates runs through the Commission on Human Rights, and it runs on a clock. A complaint has to reach the Commission's Law Enforcement Bureau within one year of the discriminatory act, and the agency's own guidance is emphatic that its online report form is not itself a complaint: the deadline does not stop running until a verified complaint is signed, notarized, and mailed or delivered to that bureau. Going to court instead carries a three-year window. What the record does not promise is speed. A December 2025 audit by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's office, examining how the Commission handled housing discrimination complaints, found cases taking an average of 883 days to resolve, some running past three years, and one open for more than seven; of 51,702 housing discrimination inquiries logged from July 1, 2019 through July 31, 2024, 474 had been filed as formal complaints. A process existing and a person being able to use it are not the same fact.