Religion Law Commons^™

Condemning Religion: Rluipa And The Politics Of Eminent Domain, Christopher Serkin, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Should religious landowners enjoy special protection from eminent domain? A recent federal statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), compels courts to apply a compelling interest test to zoning and landmarking regulations that substantially burden religiously owned property. That provision has been controversial in itself, but today a new cutting-edge issue is emerging: whether the Act’s extraordinary protection should extend to condemnation as well. The matter has taken on added significance in the wake of Kelo, where the Supreme Court reaffirmed its expansive view of the eminent domain power. In this Article, we argue that RLUIPA should …

House Of Wisdom Or A House Of Cards? Why Teaching Islam In U.S. Foreign Detention Facilities Violates The Establishment Clause, Scott Thompson

Publications

In an attempt to erase Islamic-fundamentalist sentiments held by detainees apprehended in the course of the "war on terror," the United States government began teaching and preaching a more moderate version of the Qur'an and Islam to detainees in Iraq. One such detention program in Iraq was dubbed the House of Wisdom. But the wisdom of such a practice is highly suspect--both because it likely runs afoul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and because it may be doing more harm than good to the American effort to defuse Islamic-extremism and anti-American sentiment. This Article examines the practice …

Parental Rights And The State Regulation Of Religious Schools, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

In Wisconsin v. Yoder, the United States Supreme Court invalidated convictions of several Amish parents for removing their children from school in violation of state mandatory attendance laws. In reaching its decision, the Court argued that protecting the Amish parents’ decisions fit into a longstanding American tradition of giving parents control over the upbringing of their children. Yet the Supreme Court mischaracterized the history of parental rights and state interests in education. Contemporary historical research shows that parents have long ceded a large measure of control to the state in the education of their children. Still, very little has been …

Turkey: At The Crossroads Of Secular West And Traditional East, Padideh Ala'i

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

On January 9, 2008 Washington College of Law at American University sponsored a conference entitled: Turkey: At the Crossroads of Secular West and Traditional East. This conference was percipitated by the recent election of the AKP party in Turkey and my trip to Turkey in summer 2007. In this short introduction to the American University International law Review symposium issue, I summarize the major issues raised in that one day conference specifically by Dean Haluk Kabaalioglu of Yeditepe University Facutly of Law, expert on EU law and Turkish-EU relations,and Professor Feroz Ahmad, the learned historian of modern Turkey. The aim …

Religious Freedom, Church Autonomy, And Constitutionalism, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

Our topic at this symposium is "religion, the state, and constitutionalism"-not "the Constitution," or "the First Amendment," but "constitutionalism." Countless conferences, cases, books, and articles have wrestled with one version or another of the question, "how does our Constitution, with its First Amendment and its religion clauses, promote, protect, or perhaps restrain religion?" We are considering, it seems to me, a question that is different, and that is different in interesting and important ways: What are connections between religion and religious freedom, on the one hand, and constitutionalism, on the other?

Standing, Spending, And Separation: How The No-Establishment Rule Does (And Does Not) Protect Conscience, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

The First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause” is widely thought to protect “conscience.” Does it? If so, how? It is proposed in this paper that the no-establishment rule does indeed promote and protect religious liberty, and does safeguard conscience, but not (or, at least, not only) in the way most people think it does, namely, by sparing those who object from the asserted injury to their conscience caused by public funding of religious activity.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation - a case in which the Justices limited taxpayer standing to bring Establishment Clause claims - reminds …

Commerce In Religion, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

As this Symposium Article contends, religion increasingly overlaps with the commercial sphere, and courts are obligated to determine whether or not to adopt an entirely hands-off approach simply because the specter of religion lurks on the horizon. Whereas the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights tends to accept its member states' separation of commercial elements out from the protections more generally accorded to religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has treated the two spheres as overlapping. To the extent that each court does consider religious transactions in terms of commercial relations, each also arrives at a very different conception …

Privatizing And Publicizing Speech, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

When and how should governments be permitted to use private-law mechanisms to manage their public-law obligations? This short piece poses that question in the context of Summum, which the Supreme Court decided earlier this year, and Buono, which it will hear in the fall. In both cases, the government manipulated formal property rules in order to fend off constitutional challenges. In Summum, the government took ownership of a religious symbol in the face of a free speech challenge, while in Buono it shed ownership of land containing another sectarian symbol in an effort to moot an Establishment Clause problem. Although …