Religion Law Commons^™

Newsroom: Is Wall Between Church And State Crumbling? 10-10-2017, Diana Hassel

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rwu First Amendment Blog: Diana Hassel's Blog: Is The Wall Between Church And State Crumbling? 10-07-2017, Diana Hassel

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Exorcising The Clergy Privilege, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article debunks the empirical assumption behind the clergy privilege, the evidentiary rule shielding confidential communications with clergy. For over a century, scholars and the judiciary have assumed generous protection is essential to foster and encourage spiritual relationships. Accepting this premise, all fifty states and the District of Columbia have adopted virtually absolute privilege statutes. To test this assumption, this Article distills data from over 700 decisions — making it the first scholarship to analyze state clergy privilege jurisprudence exhaustively. This review finds a privilege in decline: courts have lost faith in the privilege. More surprisingly, though, so have clergy. …

Master File, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. V. Colo. Civil Rights Comm., __ U.S. __ (2017): Legislative History Of Sb08-200, Matt Simonsen

Research Data

This Master File of the legislative history of a 2008 amendment to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) was researched and compiled by Matt Simonsen, J.D. Candidate 2019, University of Colorado Law School, and submitted to law professors Craig Konnoth and Melissa Hart. The SB08-200 Master File is cited in Brief of Amici Curiae Colorado Organizations and Individuals in Support of Respondents, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, __U.S.__ (2018) (No. 16-111).

449 p.

Paliotta V. State Dep’T Of Corrections, 133 Nev. Adv. Op. 58 (Sept. 14, 2017), Anna Sichting

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined it must consider the sincere religious beliefs of the individual when evaluating claims under the Free Exercise Clause and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). It is improper to evaluate those claims under the centrality test, which attempts to determine if the individual’s beliefs are central to a tenant of the religion in question. Once the sincere belief is shown, the courts must then fully examine the remaining considerations under the Free Exercise Clause and the RLUIPA.

Religious Difference In A Secular Age: The Minority Report By Saba Mahmoud (2016) Book Review, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Minority Report is a text that tries to respond to the problem of essentializing Islam (the culturalism problem) by performing a flip so that all the bad attributes typically associated with “Islam” are now attributed to secularism instead. It is secularism that discriminates, that is sectarian, that encourages violence, that is repressive, sexist, etc. This Mahmood does by on the one hand hyper-politicizing secularism (depleting it of its universalist drive), and on the other under-politicizing it by ignoring its internal indeterminacy, complexity, open structure and varied distributive effects. The result is an account that moves between crude historicism-secularism is …

Lost & Found: Order In The Court -- The Party Game, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The second game in the series, Lost & Found: Order in the Court …

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

Salafism, Wahhabism, And The Definition Of Sunni Islam, Rob J. Williams

Honors Program: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

My capstone deals with the historical definition of Sunni Islam, and how it has changed in approximately the past 200 years. Around 1800, Sunni Islam was pretty clearly defined by an adherence to one of four maddhabs, or schools of law: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali schools and are all based in nearly a millennium of legal scholarship. Since 1800, however, numerous reform movements have sprung up which disavow previous scholarship and interpret Islamic law their own way. However, certain reformist groups, such as Traditionalist Salafis and Wahhabis, claim that their version of Islam is the only “pure” …

Adjudicating Religious Sincerity, Nathan Chapman

Scholarly Works

Recent disputes about the “contraception mandate” under the Affordable Care Act and about the provision of goods and services for same-sex weddings have drawn attention to the law of religious accommodations. So far, however, one of the requirements of a religious accommodation claim has escaped sustained scholarly attention: a claimant must be sincere. Historically, scholars have contested this requirement on the ground that adjudicating religious sincerity requires government officials to delve too deeply into religious questions, something the Establishment Clause forbids. Until recently, however, the doctrine was fairly clear: though the government may not evaluate the objective accuracy or plausibility …

The Forest And The Trees: What Educational Purposes Can A Course On Christian Legal Thought Serve?, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

In this short essay, I want to consider the educational purposes a course in Christian legal thought might serve. How could having such a course in the curriculum help accomplish the goals of legal education? One can understand why a law school with a Christian identity would want to offer this sort of course. Such law schools embrace a theology that helps adherents make sense of the world, including the world of human law. The less obvious question I want to consider is why a law school that does not subscribe to a particular theological understanding of the world (or …