Legal History Commons^™

Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

This Article peels through these layers of founding documents before exploring the final sixteen words of the First Amendment religion clauses. Part I explores the founding generation’s main teachings on religious freedom, identifying the major principles that they held in common. Part II sets out a few representative state constitutional provisions on religious freedom created from 1776 to 1784. Part III reviews briefly the actions by the Continental Congress on religion and religious freedom issued between 1774 and 1789. Part IV touches on the deprecated place of religious freedom in the drafting of the 1787 United States Constitution. Part V …

Forgotten Federal-Missionary Partnerships: New Light On The Establishment Clause, Nathan Chapman

Scholarly Works

Americans have long disputed whether the government may support religious instruction as part of an elementary education. Since Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court has gradually articulated a doctrine that permits states to provide funds, indirectly through vouchers and in some cases directly through grants, to religious schools for the nonreligious goods they provide. Unlike most other areas of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, however, the Court has not built this doctrine on a historical foundation. In fact, in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), the dissenters from this doctrine were the ones to rely on the founding-era record.

Intriguingly, …

Comments On Steven Smith, Pagans And Christians In The City, Michael P. Moreland

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

One of the most interesting aspects of this generally very interesting book was the discussion of sexual morality in paganism and Christianity. I have thought for a while that much of the contemporary debate about religious freedom is not about religious freedom in a generic sense but instead about religious freedom in a very particular context—sex. But that is a descriptive point—much more challenging is trying to give an account of why sex should have come to be (or as Smith’s argument implies, has long been) the battlefield on which much of the fight over religious freedom takes place. …

A Tale Of Two Cities: Religious Freedom In A Secular Age, Anna Su

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

Understanding the terms under which Christianity and paganism could coexist in antiquity thus gives us a semblance of an answer to the question posed early on in the book. In ancient Rome, Pliny asks why Christians were being subjected to legal sanctions, while in our present time, Douglas Laycock asks why people—referring to same-sex couples suing wedding photographers, florists, and bakers who object on religious grounds to their union—would insist on these services they neither need nor want? The paganism of ancient Rome welcomed a plurality of cults and religions but only up to a certain point. When Christians …

Many Cities, One Nation: A Response To Steven Smith's Pagans And Christians In The City, Bruce P. Frohnen

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

In his treatment of contemporary legal issues and, more deeply, his analysis of the manner in which changing religious assumptions and goals shape the culture from which law naturally grows, Smith has provided both a strong critique of contemporary “secular” pieties and an explanation for the culture wars so often derided or minimized by those most determined to deconstruct traditional culture. Still, I would argue that Smith’s wide-ranging, radical rethinking of contemporary social disorder does not go far enough. As Smith’s discussion of contemporary judicial treatment of social structure makes clear, today’s legal elites are at heart totalitarian in …

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Religion And Theistic Faith: On Koppelman, Leiter, Secular Purpose, And Accomodations, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

What makes religion distinctive, and how does answering that question help us answer questions regarding religious freedom in a liberal democracy? In their books on religion in the United States under our Constitution, Andrew Koppelman (DefendingAmerican Religious Neutrality) and Brian Leiter (Why Tolerate Religion?) offer sharply different answers to this set of questions. This review essay first explores why we might treat religion distinctively, suggesting that in our constitutional order, it makes sense to focus on theism (or any roughly similar analogue) as the hallmark of religious belief and practice. Neither Koppelman nor Leiter focuses on this, in part because …

Liberty Of The Exercise Of Religion In The Peace Of Westphalia, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This essay honors my dear friend of half a century, Burns Weston. In it, I take a fresh look at the backdrop and structure of toleration and religious freedom in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and in the American Constitution, with special focus on a recent unanimous Supreme Court decision of first impression. That important decision protects inner church freedoms in ecclesiastical employment, the so-called "ministerial exception" to federal and state employment discrimination laws.

"Of all the great world religions past and present," writes the noted historian Perez Zagorin, "Christianity has been by far the most intolerant." Violence and …

The Gentleman From Hagerstown: How Maryland Jews Won The Right To Vote, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the early history of Maryland in the context of religious discrimination, specifically in reference to discrimination against those of the Jewish faith, even though the state "was founded as a haven of religious liberty and beacon of toleration." It also highlights a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, Thomas Kennedy, a Christian, as being the leader of the movement to ultimately correct this injustice. Part of the problem were clauses in the state's constitution requiring officeholders to be Christians. Kennedy lost his seat in the House, but didn't give up the battle. Ha had tried several …

Cutter And The Preferred Position Of The Free Exercise Clause, Steven Goldberg

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Cutter v. Wilkinson (2005) allowed Congress to give religious exercise a status superior to that given to free speech. In upholding RLUIPA, a statute protecting inmate religious freedom, the Court explicitly held that statutes can allow prisoners to “assemble for worship, but not for political rallies.” Religion, which lost in Smith (1990) the traditional “preferred position” courts have accorded First Amendment rights, can now regain that position through legislation notwithstanding the Establishment Clause. Indeed, religion has not just regained parity with free speech, it now receives greater protection in the prison setting. This striking …

Roger Williams On Liberty Of Conscience, Edward J. Eberle

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Symposium: Religious Liberty In America And Beyond: Celebrating The Legacy Of Roger Williams On The 400th Anniversary Of His Birth: Introduction, Edward J. Eberle

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Another Of Roger William's Gifts: Women's Right To Liberty Of Conscience: Joshua Verin V. Providence Plantations, Edward J. Eberle

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Religious Freedom And The Undoing Of The Westphalian State, Daniel Philpott

Michigan Journal of International Law

Not so long ago, in 1998, the world acknowledged both the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 350th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia. The Universal Declaration was celebrated in the popular press, by thousands of activists, and at well attended open forums at schools and universities. Westphalia was noted almost exclusively at academic conferences. But public obscurity is an undeserved fate for Westphalia, for its legacy in organizing our political world vies with that of the American and French revolutions. What Westphalia inaugurated was a system of sovereign states where a single authority resided …

The First Free Exercise Case, Walter J. Walsh

Articles

Part I of this Article tells the colonial history of religious freedom in New York State from a minority perspective, with specific reference to the secrecy of the confessional-the very practice that would be constitutionally tested in Philips. Part II describes the immediate social and political issues raised by the influx of Irish Catholic refugees into New York City in the wake of the failed United Irish Rebellion of 1798. Part III treats the unfriendly 1811 ruling of the federalist Chief Justice James Kent in People v. Ruggles as representative of the dominant Anglocentric constitutional legacy of imperial Protestant …

The First Americans And The "Free" Exercise Of Religion, Martin C. Loesch

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Equality And Diversity: The Eighteenth-Century Debate About Equal Protection And Equal Civil Rights, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Living, as we do, in a world in which our discussions of equality often lead back to the desegregation decisions, to the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the antislavery debates of the 1830s, we tend to allow those momentous events to dominate our understanding of the ideas of equal protection and equal civil rights. Indeed, historians have frequently asserted that the idea of equal protection first developed in the 1830s in discussions of slavery and that it otherwise had little history prior to its adoption into the U.S. Constitution. Long before the Fourteenth Amendment, however – long before even the 1830s …

On The Road Of Good Intentions: Justice Brennan And The Religion Clauses, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Associate Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan took the oath of office on October 16, 1956. At the time of Justice Brennan’s appointment to the Supreme Court, the Court had decided only a few cases involving the religion clauses of the first amendment, and judicial interpretation of the religion clauses had been sparing.

In the thirty-four years of Justice Brennan’s tenure, the Court worked several revolutions in religion clause jurisprudence—revolutions guided by a sense of the needs of a changing society. Justice Brennan was one of several architects of a new order in establishment clause interpretation, and was the architect …