Religion Law Commons^™

Government Nonendorsement, Nelson Tebbe

Nelson Tebbe

What are the constitutional limits on government endorsement? Judges and scholars typically assume that when the government speaks on its own account, it faces few restrictions. In fact, they often say that the only real restriction on government speech is the Establishment Clause. On this view, officials cannot endorse, say, Christianity, but otherwise they enjoy wide latitude to promote democracy or denigrate smoking. Two doctrines and their accompanying literatures have fed this impression. First, the Court’s recent free speech cases have suggested that government speech is virtually unfettered. Second, experts on religious freedom have long assumed that there is no …

State Bar Efforts To Deny Accreditation To Faith-Based Cle Ethics Programs Sponsored By Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, Bill Piatt

Faculty Articles

Religiously affiliated law schools focus on the integration of faith in the formation of future attorneys and leaders. Yet our students are only our students for three years. We can extend our influence and continue to provide a faith-based perspective to them and to other attorneys during the thirty, forty, or more years of their careers by offering continuing legal education (CLE) courses, which bring attorneys and judges together to provide a model for incorporating faith and morality into our professional roles. However, CLE programs must receive accreditation by state authorities if participants are to receive credit for them. Recently, …

Foreign And Religious Family Law: Comity, Contract, And The Constitution, Ann Laquer Estin

Pepperdine Law Review

The article focuses on role of the U.S. courts in confronting religious laws in dispute resolution of various cases of domestic relations, contracts, and torts. Topics discussed include role of secular courts in maintaining constitutional balance between the free exercise and establishment clauses, constitutional challenges faced by religious adherents, and importance of legal pluralism in the U.S.

Faith-Based Private Arbitration As A Model For Preserving Rights And Values In A Pluralistic Society, Michael J. Broyde

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article discusses private arbitration in religious and values-oriented communities. Using contract law as the foundation for arbitration law, religious arbitration panels can function almost like courts so long as the government can assure basic fairness and proper procedures, while allowing the parties to resolve their private dispute as the parties wish. This article explains that to be enforced, these private courts must meet the procedural requirements set by the Federal Arbitration Act, but American arbitration law is not generally concerned with the substantive law used by these tribunals, although this article recommends practices that religious tribunals ought to adopt …

Between Law And Religion: Procedural Challenges To Religious Arbitration Awards, Michael A. Helfand

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This Article explores the unique status of religious law as a hybrid concept that simultaneously retains the characteristics of both law and religion. To do so, the Article considers as a case study how courts should evaluate procedural challenges to religious arbitration awards. To respond to such challenges, courts must treat religious law as law when defining the contractually adopted religious procedural rules, but treat religious law as religion when reviewing precisely what the religious procedural rules require. On this account, constitutional and arbitration doctrine combine to insulate religious arbitration awards from judicial scrutiny even on procedural grounds, leaving courts …

Lawrence V. Texas: The Decision And Its Implications For The Future, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Government Nonendorsement, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What are the constitutional limits on government endorsement? Judges and scholars typically assume that when the government speaks on its own account, it faces few restrictions. In fact, they often say that the only real restriction on government speech is the Establishment Clause. On this view, officials cannot endorse, say, Christianity, but otherwise they enjoy wide latitude to promote democracy or denigrate smoking. Two doctrines and their accompanying literatures have fed this impression. First, the Court’s recent free speech cases have suggested that government speech is virtually unfettered. Second, experts on religious freedom have long assumed that there is no …

Due Process In Islamic Criminal Law, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

Rules and principles of due process in criminal law--how to, and how not to, investigate crime and criminal suspects, prosecute the accused, adjudicate criminal cases, and punish the convicted--appear in the traditional sources of Islamic law: the Quran, the Sunna, and classical jurisprudence. But few of these rules and principles are followed in the modern-day practice of Islamic criminal law. Rather, states that claim to practice Islamic criminal law today mostly follow laws and practices of criminal procedure that were adopted from European nations in the twentieth century, without reference to the constraints and protections of Islamic law itself. To …

The Constitutional Right Not To Kill, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

Federal and state governments participate in and/or permit a variety of different types of killings. These include military operations, capital punishment, assisted suicide, abortion and self-defense or defense of others. In a pluralistic society, it is no surprise that there will be some members of the population who refuse to participate in some or all of these types of killings. The question of how governments should treat such refusals is older than the Republic itself. Since colonial times, the answer to this question has been driven largely by statutory protections, with the Constitution playing a smaller role, particularly since the …

The Constitutional Right Not To Participate In Abortions: Roe, Casey, And The Fourteenth Amendment Rights Of Healthcare Providers, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

The Fourteenth Amendment rights of various parties in the abortion context – the pregnant woman, the fetus, the fetus’ father, the state – have been discussed at length by commentators and the courts. Surprisingly, the Fourteenth Amendment rights of the healthcare provider asked to provide the abortion have not. Roe and Casey establish a pregnant woman’s Fourteenth Amendment right to decide for herself whether to have an abortion. Do those same precedents also protect her doctor’s right to decide whether to participate in abortion procedures?

The Court’s substantive due process analysis typically looks for rights that are “deeply rooted” in …

Debt And Democracy: Towards A Constitutional Theory Of Bankruptcy, Jonathan C. Lipson

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the relationship between bankruptcy and constitutional law. Article I, § 8, cl. 4 of the Constitution provides that Congress shall have the power to make “uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies.” While there are many good social, political and economic theories of bankruptcy, there has been surprisingly little effort to explore what it means to have constitutionalized financial distress. This article is a first step in that direction. Constitutional problems with bankruptcy are not new, but present three under-appreciated puzzles: First, why have we put a bankruptcy power in the Constitution, and what does its “peculiar” …

Municipal Corporations - Zoning - Exclusion Of Churches From Residential Area, William R. Luney S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

In two recent New York cases churches sought permits to use residential property for church purposes, including worship, social gatherings, construction of an adjacent parking lot, and, in one case, establishment of a school and playground. In each case the zoning board denied the permit on grounds that a church would change the residential character of the neighborhood, decrease the enjoyment of neighboring property, depreciate property values, and that the contemplated use of the property for other than worship was prohibited by the ordinance. The lower court upheld the decisions of both zoning boards. On appeal to the New York …