article: On September 4, 2013, a for-profit company filed this lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of D.C. against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the Administrative Procedure Act. and the First Amendment. The plaintiff, represented by the Thomas More Society, asked the court for an exception to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandate requiring employers to provide health insurance coverage of contraception. Specifically, the plaintiff claimed that providing insurance coverage of contraception would violate the deeply held, Catholic religious beliefs of the corporation's owners. On September 25, 2013, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson granted the plaintiff's unopposed motion for preliminary injunction and stayed the case. The court initially ordered a stay until the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in <a href="http://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=12714&">Gilardi v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services </a>. The district court kept the stay in place until after the Supreme Court's ruling in <a href="http://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=12661">Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius </a> on June 30, 2014. In Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court held that the version of the contraceptive services mandate in place at that time was a violation of the plaintiff's rights under the RFRA. Based on that ruling and the parties' joint status report, on October 27, 2014 the district court entered a permanent injunction and judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, enjoining defendants from enforcing the version of the contraception mandate at issue in Hobby Lobby against the plaintiffs in this case. The parties were instructed to meet and confer on attorneys' fees and costs. The most recent status report in following that order was entered on December 17, 2014.
summary: A for-profit company sought an exception to the Affordable Care Act's mandate requiring employers to provide health insurance coverage of contraception because it violates the owner's religious beliefs. Following the Supreme Court's decision in Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius, the District Court for the District of Columbia granted an injunction for the plaintiffs against the version of the contraceptive services mandate at issue in Hobby Lobby.