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Religious Exemptions, Formal Neutrality, And Laïcité, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Rights to free exercise in the United States are governed by a doctrine of formal neutrality, which seems to resemble the French doctrine of la'cit6. This resemblance tempts one to conclude that the doctrinal regimes of religious liberty in the United States and France are also essentially the same. Despite their superficial resemblance, however formal neutrality and laĭcité generate regimes of religious liberty that are substantially, even radically, different. Notwithstanding conceptually similar organizing principles, there is a significant difference in the substance of religious liberty in the United States and France owing to very different conceptions of the proper role …