Legal History Commons^™

Religious Freedom And Diversity Missions: Insights From Jesuit Law Deans, Anthony E. Varona, Michèle Alexandre, Michael J. Kaufman, Madeleine M. Landrieu

Seattle University Law Review

This Article is a transcript of a panel moderated by Anthony E. Varona, Dean of Seattle University School of Law. During the panel, Jesuit and religious law school deans discussed what law schools with religious missions have to add to the conversation around SFFA and the continuing role of affirmative action in higher education.

American Legion V. American Humanist Association, Seth T. Bonilla

Public Land & Resources Law Review

The separation of church and state is a key element of American democracy, but its interpretation has been challenged as the country grows more diverse. In American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the Supreme Court adopted a new standard to analyze whether a religious symbol on public land maintained by public funding violated the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.

Establishment Of Religion Supreme Court Appellate Division Third Department

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Render Unto Caesar: How Misunderstanding A Century Of Free Exercise Jurisprudence Forged And Then Fractured The Rfra Coalition, John S. Blattner

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis provides a comprehensive history of Supreme Court Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence from 1879 until the present day. It describes how a jurisdictional approach to free exercise dominated the Court’s rulings from its first Free Exercise Clause case in 1879 until Sherbert v. Verner in 1963, and how Sherbert introduced an accommodationist precedent which was ineffectively, incompletely, and inconsistently defined by the Court. This thesis shows how proponents of accommodationism furthered a false narrative overstating the scope and consistency of Sherbert’s precedent following the Court’s repudiation of accommodationism and return to full jurisdictionalism with Employment Division v. Smith …

The Democratic First Amendment, Ashutosh Bhagwat

Northwestern University Law Review

Over the past several decades, the Supreme Court and most First Amendment scholars have taken the position that the primary reason why the First Amendment protects freedom of speech is to advance democratic self-governance. In this Article, I will argue that this position, while surely correct insofar as it goes, is also radically incomplete. The fundamental problem is that the Court and, until recently, scholars have focused exclusively on the Religion Clauses and the Free Speech Clause. The rest of the First Amendment—the Press, Assembly, and Petition Clauses—might as well not exist. The topic of this Article is the five …

Ancient And Comely Order: The Use And Disuse Of Arbitration By New York Quakers, F. Peter Philips

Articles & Chapters

From the late 17th century, the Religious Society of Friends (“Quakers”) observed a method of resolving disputes arising within congregations that was scripturally based, and culminated in final and binding arbitration. The practice of Quaker arbitration gradually disappeared during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and few modern Quakers are even aware of it. This article traces that decline and notes similarities with mercantile arbitration. In both religious and mercantile arbitration, a defined community valued the goal of avoiding group disruption more than the goal of vindicating individual legal rights. In both cases, members of the community applied distinct …

Free Exercise For Whom? -- Could The Religious Liberty Principle That Catholics Established In Perez V. Sharp Also Protect Same-Sex Couples' Right To Marry?, Eric Alan Isaacson

Eric Alan Isaacson

Recent discussions about the threat that same-sex couples hypothetically pose to the religious freedom of Americans whose religions traditions frown upon same-sex unions have largely overlooked the possibility that same-sex couples might have their own religious-liberty interest in being able to marry. The General Synod of the United Church of Christ brought the issue to the fore with an April 2014 lawsuit challenging North Carolina laws barring same-sex marriages. Authored by a lawyer who represented the California Council of Churches and other religions organizations as amici curiae in recent marriage-equality litigation, this article argues that although marriage is a secular …

The Original Meaning Of "God": Using The Language Of The Framing Generation To Create A Coherent Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Michael I. Meyerson

Marquette Law Review

The Supreme Court’s attempt to create a standard for evaluating whether the Establishment Clause is violated by religious governmental speech, such as the public display of the Ten Commandments or the Pledge of Allegiance, is a total failure. The Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been termed “convoluted,” “a muddled mess,” and “a polite lie.” Unwilling to either allow all governmental religious speech or ban it entirely, the Court is in need of a coherent standard for distinguishing the permissible from the unconstitutional. Thus far, no Justice has offered such a standard.

A careful reading of the history of the framing …

Overcoming Obstacles To Religious Exercise In K-12 Education, Lewis M. Wasserman

Lewis M. Wasserman

Overcoming Obstacles to Religious Exercise in K-12 Education Lewis M. Wasserman Abstract Judicial decisions rendered during the last half-century have overwhelmingly favored educational agencies over claims by parents for religious accommodations to public education requirements, no matter what constitutional or statutory rights were pressed at the tribunal, or when the conflict arose. These claim failures are especially striking in the wake of the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (“RFRAs”) passed by Congress in 1993 and, to date, by eighteen state legislatures thereafter, since the RFRAs were intended to (1) insulate religious adherents from injuries inflicted by the United States Supreme Court’s …

Alive And Well: Religious Freedom In The Welfare State, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Irrelevance Of The Constitution: The Religion Clauses Of The First Amendment And The Supreme Court, Philip B. Kurland

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Obscenity, The Law And Religion, Thomas A. Long

IUSTITIA

The long history of the relation between Western religion and secular law is both interesting and complex.' In what follows I shall discuss one current social issue which is illustrative of this relation,namely, the relatively recent legal-moral controversy over obscenity.