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Full-Text Articles in Law
Corporations, Taxes, And Religion: The Hobby Lobby And Conestoga Contraceptive Cases, Steven Willis
Corporations, Taxes, And Religion: The Hobby Lobby And Conestoga Contraceptive Cases, Steven Willis
Steven J. Willis
Beginning in 2013, the federal government mandated that general business corporations include contraceptive and early abortion coverage in large employee health plans. Internal Revenue Code Section 4980D imposes a substantial excise tax on health plans violating the mandate. Indeed, for one company – Hobby Lobby – the expected annual tax is nearly one-half billion dollars. Dozens of “for profit” businesses have challenged the mandate on free exercise grounds, asserting claims under the First Amendment as well as under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. So far, courts have been reluctant to hold corporations have religious rights of their own; as a …
Corporate Piety And Impropriety: Hobby Lobby's Extension Of Rfra Rights To For-Profit Corporations, Amy Sepinwall
Corporate Piety And Impropriety: Hobby Lobby's Extension Of Rfra Rights To For-Profit Corporations, Amy Sepinwall
Amy J. Sepinwall
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court held, for the first time, that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) applied to for-profit corporations and, on that basis, it allowed Hobby Lobby to omit otherwise mandated contraceptive coverage from its employee healthcare package. Critics argue that the Court’s novel expansion of corporate rights is fundamentally inconsistent with the basic principles of corporate law. In particular, they contend that the decision ignores the fact that the corporation, as an artificial entity, cannot exercise religion in its own right, and they decry the notion that the law might look through the corporate …
Conscience And Complicity: Assessing Pleas For Religious Exemptions After Hobby Lobby, Amy Sepinwall
Conscience And Complicity: Assessing Pleas For Religious Exemptions After Hobby Lobby, Amy Sepinwall
Amy J. Sepinwall
In the paradigmatic case of conscientious objection, the objector claims that his religion forbids him from actively participating in a wrong (e.g., by fighting in a war). In the religious challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, on the other hand, employers claim that their religious convictions forbid them from merely subsidizing insurance through which their employees might commit a wrong (e.g., by using contraception). The understanding of complicity underpinning these challenges is vastly more expansive than what standard legal doctrine or moral theory contemplates. Courts routinely reject claims of conscientious objection to taxes that fund military initiatives, or …