Law Commons^™

Second-Best Free Exercise, Christopher C. Lund

Fordham Law Review

The future of the Free Exercise Clause is up in the air. Thirty years ago, in Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court held the Free Exercise Clause only protected against religious discrimination and did not require exemptions from neutral and generally applicable laws.

Yet despite having an official rule against religious exemptions, the Roberts Court has somehow managed to give religious exemptions in case after case. This illustrates Smith’s waning power—the case has become more of an obstacle for courts to work around than a precedent for courts to obey. But these victories have also come to …

Reflections/Lovingkindness, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Dilemma Of Liberal Pluralism, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Supporters of reproductive rights and of queer rights may sometimes live in harmony with advocates for religious exemptions. But sometimes these goals conflict. This Article explores this tension as a matter of liberal democratic theory and U.S. constitutional law, offering a case for seeing a robust pluralism as contained within a proper understanding of the liberal democratic state. The state’s claimed authority may be the starting point, but just as the modern state was born in decentralized religious toleration, so should the modern state accommodate religious and other views of the good that compete with the state’s own views. The …

‘Nothing About Us Without Us’: Toward A Liberatory Heterodox Halakha, Laynie Laynie Soloman, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

The role and function of “halakha” (Jewish law) in Jewish communal life is a divisive issue: while Orthodox Jews tend to embrace Jewish law, non-Orthodox Jews (here deemed “Heterodox”) generally reject Jewish law and halakhic discourse. We will explore the way in which Robert Cover’s work offers an antidote to categorical Heterodox distaste for halakha specifically, and law more broadly, providing a pathway into an articulation of halakha that may speak to Heterodox Jews specifically: one that is driven by creative “jurisgenerative” potential, that is informed by a paideic pluralism, and that is fundamentally democratic in its commitment to being …