Law Commons^™

August 19, 2008: Rick Warren And Religious Tests, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Rick Warren and Religious Tests“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Student Speech: Whose Speech Is It Anyway And Why Does The First Amendment Care?, Leora Harpaz

Faculty Scholarship

A key feature of First Amendment speech analysis in the public schools focuses on speaker identity. Speaker identity can play a crucial role in designing the First Amendment landscape on a variety of issues including the right of speakers to gain access to public school forums for expression, the right of student editors to control the content of school-sponsored publications, and the right of school administrators to permit religious speech in the public school setting. Courts faced with decisions about whether speech in the public school setting is private or government speech must consider the context in which the speech …

The Political Origins Of Secular Public Education: The New York School Controversy 1840-1842, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

As the title suggests, this article explores the historical origins of secular public education, with a particular focus on the controversy surrounding the Catholic petitions for school funding in nineteenth-century New York City. The article first examines the development of Protestant nonsectarian common schools in the northeast, then turns to the New York controversy in detail, and finally explores that controversy's legacy in state constitutions and the Supreme Court. It is particularly concerned with two ideas generated in New York: (1) Bishop John Hughes' objection to nonsectarianism as the 'sectarianism of infidelity'; and (2) New York Secretary of State John …

Returning To Hazelwood's Core: A New Approach To Restrictions On School-Sponsored Speech, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Article begins by discussing the Hazelwood decision in depth. It then discusses the various contexts in which courts have applied Hazelwood and the circuit split that has developed over how broadly Hazelwood should reach. Next, it describes the circuit split over whether Hazelwood permits viewpoint-based speech restrictions, highlighting the different speech contexts in which the circuits have reached divergent conclusions. The Article then argues that the overextension of Hazelwood links the two splits. This Part also discusses why Hazelwood is uniquely suited to the student speech context and why other doctrines-namely, the Pickering-Connick framework for teachers' classroom speech and …

Reconsidering Gobitis: An Exercise In Presidential Leadership, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In June of 1940, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Minersville School District v. Gobitis that the First Amendment posed no barrier to the punishment of two school age Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to pay homage to the American flag. Three years later, the Justices reversed themselves in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. This sudden change has prompted a host of explanations. Some observers have stressed changes in judicial personnel in the intervening years; others have pointed to the wax and wane of general anxieties over the war; still others have emphasized the sympathy-inspiring acts of …

Commercial Speech, First Amendment Intuitionism And The Twilight Zone Of Viewpoint Discrimination, Martin H. Redish

Faculty Working Papers

In this article, I seek to demonstrate that arguments made by scholars against First Amendment protection for commercial speech may be divided into three categories: (1) rationalist, (2) intuitionist, and (3) ideological. I argue that all three forms of opposition to commercial speech protection suffer, either directly or indirectly, from the same fundamental flaw: each constitutes or at the very least facilitates creation of a constitutionally destructive form of viewpoint discrimination. I show that all of the specific rationales for opposing First Amendment protection for commercial speech are fatally and illogically underinclusive: In each case the justification asserted to support …

The Measure Of Government Speech: Identifying Expression's Source, Helen Norton

Publications

States and other governmental bodies increasingly invoke the government speech defense to First Amendment challenges by private parties who seek to alter or join what the government contends is its own expression. These disputes involve competing claims to the same speech: a private party maintains that a certain means of expression reflects (or should be allowed to reflect) her own views, while a public entity claims that same speech as its own, along with the ability to control its content.

In suggesting a framework for approaching these problems, this Article starts by examining the theoretical and practical justifications for insulating …

The Outrageous God: Emotional Distress, Tort Liability, And The Limits Of Religious Advocacy, Jeffrey Shulman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

When Matthew Snyder died fighting for his country, his memory was celebrated, and his loss mourned. The Westboro Baptist Church conducted a celebration of a different kind by picketing near Matthew’s funeral service. The church held signs that read, “You are going to hell,” “God hates you,” “Thank God for dead soldiers,” and “Semper fi fags.” In the weeks following the funeral, the church posted on its website, godhatesfags.com, an “epic” entitled “The Burden of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder.” Matthew’s burden, as the church saw it, was that he had been “raised for the devil” and “taught to defy …

The Possibility Of A Secular First Amendment, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

In a series of articles and now in their new book, Religious Freedom and the Constitution, Lawrence Sager and Christopher Eisgruber (E&S) defend an interpretation of the religion clauses of the First Amendment which, they write, "denies that religion is a constitutional anomaly, a category of human experience that demands special benefits and/or necessitates special restrictions." While not a book review in the traditional sense, my essay takes E&S's defense of a secular First Amendment as a starting point and asks, how did we get to the point where an interpretation of the First Amendment which denies that religion is …