Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Law
Reynolds Revisited: The Original Meaning Of Reynolds V. United States And Free Exercise After Fulton, Clark B. Lombardi
Reynolds Revisited: The Original Meaning Of Reynolds V. United States And Free Exercise After Fulton, Clark B. Lombardi
Articles
This Article calls for a profound reevaluation of the stories that are being told today about the Supreme Court’s free exercise jurisprudence starting with the Court’s seminal 1879 decision in Reynolds v. United States and proceeding up to the present day. Scholars and judges today agree that the Supreme Court in Reynolds interpreted the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to protect only religious belief and not religiously motivated action. All casebooks today embrace this interpretation of the case, and the Supreme Court has regularly endorsed it over the past twenty years, most recently in 2022. However, this Article …
Speech-Facilitating Conduct, Jud Campbell
Speech-Facilitating Conduct, Jud Campbell
Law Faculty Publications
Free speech doctrine generally protects only expression, leaving regulations of nonexpressive conduct beyond the First Amendment’s scope. Yet the Supreme Court has recognized that abridgments of the freedom of speech “may operate at different points in the speech process.” This notion of protection for nonexpressive conduct that facilitates speech touches on many of the most contentious issues in First Amendment law— restrictions on photography and audiovisual recording, limits on campaign contributions, putative newsgathering privileges for journalists, compelled subsidization of speech, and associational rights, to name just a few. Scholars, however, have generally approached these topics in isolation, typically focusing on …
Narrative Pluralism And The Doctrine Incoherence In Hosanna-Tabor, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Narrative Pluralism And The Doctrine Incoherence In Hosanna-Tabor, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Faculty Scholarship
In Hosanna-Tabor Church and School v. EEOC, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that the Religion Clauses require a “ministerial exception” to federal antidiscrimination laws, holding that religious congregations have a broad and categorical immunity against government interference in ministerial employment decisions.
Hosanna-Tabor is filled with ironies. The case is as much about unjustified discrimination and administrative inconsistency as religious liberty. The Court’s endorsement of the exception as a feature of church autonomy overlooks that churches subvert autonomy as often as they protect it. The exception described by the Court is so broad, absolute, and inflexible that it …
Smith In Theory And Practice, Nelson Tebbe
Smith In Theory And Practice, Nelson Tebbe
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Employment Division v. Smith controversially held that general laws that were neutral toward religion would no longer be presumptively invalid, regardless of how much they incidentally burdened religious practices. That decision sparked a debate that continues today, twenty years later. This symposium Essay explores the argument that subsequent courts have in fact been less constrained by the principal rule of Smith than advocates on both sides of the controversy usually assume. Lower courts administering real world disputes often find they have all the room they need to grant relief from general laws, given exceptions written into the decision itself and …
Can The Irs Silence Religious Organizations, Meghan J. Ryan
Can The Irs Silence Religious Organizations, Meghan J. Ryan
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
In the years following the 2004 presidential election, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service threatened revoking the tax-exempt status of the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena because during a 2004 sermon, a church rector stated that he opposed the Vietnam and Gulf wars and that Jesus would have disapproved of the Bush Administration's preemptive war doctrine. The rector did not tell his parishioners who to support in the 2004 election, however. This threat of revoking an organization's tax-exempt status is just one example of the IRS's recent and unprecedented aggressiveness in seeking out violations of …
Thoughts On Smith And Religious-Group Autonomy, Laura S. Underkuffler
Thoughts On Smith And Religious-Group Autonomy, Laura S. Underkuffler
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Keeping The Sex In Sex Education: The First Amendment's Religion Clauses And The Sex Education Debate, Gary J. Simson, Erika A. Sussman
Keeping The Sex In Sex Education: The First Amendment's Religion Clauses And The Sex Education Debate, Gary J. Simson, Erika A. Sussman
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Towards A Defensible Free Exercise Doctrine, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Towards A Defensible Free Exercise Doctrine, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Faculty Scholarship
Almost from the moment that the Supreme Court abandoned the religious exemption doctrine in Employment Division v. Smith, its defenders have worked to bring it back. More than a decade later, however, Smith remains well-entrenched; not only has the Court confirmed Smith's basic holding, but it also struck the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Congress's first effort to restore the exemption doctrine, at least as it applied to the states.
Proponents of religious exemptions cannot ignore the hard truth that they can no longer be defended. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American society viewed the practice of religion-mostly Christian …