Law Commons^™

The Catholic Church And The Paycheck Protection Program: Assessing Nondiscrimination After Trinity Lutheran And Espinoza, Elizabeth Totzke

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note argues the inclusion of houses of worship and the subsequent dispersal of PPP funds to the Catholic Church was explicitly constitutional. Applying the lens of the Supreme Court’s recently announced nondiscrimination principle, this Note considers the ramifications of the SBA’s official policy and explores the constitutional justification for the SBA’s ad hoc PPP policy. In fact, under the nondiscrimination principle, this Note concludes that the SBA’s policy shift was not just constitutionally permissible, but probably constitutionally required.

Moral Truth And Constitutional Conservatism, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Conservative constitutionalism is committed to "originalism," that is, to interpreting the Constitution according to its original public understanding. This defining commitment of constitutional interpretation is sound. For decades, however, constitutional conservatives have diluted it with a methodology of restraint, a normative approach to the judicial task marked by an overriding aversion to critical moral reasoning. In any event, the methodology eclipsed originalism and the partnership with moral truth that originalism actually entails. Conservative constitutionalism is presently a melange of mostly unsound arguments against the worst depredations of Casey's Mystery Passage.

The reason for the methodological moral reticence is easy to …