Law Commons^™

Undoing Neutrality?: From Church-State Separation To Judeo-Christian Tolerance, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In Celebration Of Steven Shiffrin's The Religious Left And Church-State Relations, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Steven Shiffrin's The Religious Left and Church-State Relations is a truly remarkable book in many respects. I shall briefly note a few of its striking features, including some illustrative passages, and outline a number of its central themes, before tackling what for me is its most challenging and perplexing set of theses – the relations between constitutional and political discourse, and between religious liberals, on the one hand, and religious conservatives and secular liberals on the other.

We might well think of this as two books in one: a book about the constitutional law of free exercise and non-establishment, and …

Refusals Of Conscience: What Are They And When Should They Be Accommodated?, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Approaching this subject as a decided nonexpert, I want to explore a number of questions about a right to conscience in respect to efusals to provide health-care services. My hope is that the questions will seem important and relevant, even if some of my tentative answers are controversial or even misguided.

It is helpful to distinguish three levels of analysis: 1) What would be an ideal scope for rights of conscience if we could put aside difficulties of administration and political feasibility? 2) What would be a desirable approach given administrative and political realities? 3) And in what rhetoric should …

The Significance Of Conscience, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Conscience, like most words that describe human experience and recommend human action, has changed its meanings over time and takes on subtly different meanings in different contexts. Since the time of Thomas Aquinas, when conscience referred to moral judgments about action, and our founding era, when “freedom of conscience” dominantly referred to individual religious liberty, our understanding has evolved. In this paper, I concentrate on present usage. My aims are partially descriptive and mainly normative. My hope is that by clarifying various ways the notion of conscience is conceived, I can contribute to a thoughtful elaboration of normative issues …

Fundamental Questions About The Religion Clauses: Reflections On Some Critiques, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay responds to some major critiques of my work on the religion clauses. The effort has seemed worth undertaking because many issues the critics raise lie at the core of one’s approach to free exercise and nonestablishment, and some of those issues matter greatly for constitutional adjudication more broadly. Like any author, perhaps, my reaction to reading some comments has been that I did not quite say that, but I shall not bore you with these quibbles about how well I explained myself in the past. Rather, I shall try to confront the genuinely basic questions that many of …