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Reynolds Revisited: The Original Meaning Of Reynolds V. United States And Free Exercise After Fulton, Clark B. Lombardi
Reynolds Revisited: The Original Meaning Of Reynolds V. United States And Free Exercise After Fulton, Clark B. Lombardi
Articles
This Article calls for a profound reevaluation of the stories that are being told today about the Supreme Court’s free exercise jurisprudence starting with the Court’s seminal 1879 decision in Reynolds v. United States and proceeding up to the present day. Scholars and judges today agree that the Supreme Court in Reynolds interpreted the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to protect only religious belief and not religiously motivated action. All casebooks today embrace this interpretation of the case, and the Supreme Court has regularly endorsed it over the past twenty years, most recently in 2022. However, this Article …
Nineteenth-Century Free Exercise Jurisprudence And The Challenge Of Polygamy: The Relevance Of Nineteenth-Century Cases And Commentaries For Contemporary Debates About Free Exercise Exemptions, Clark B. Lombardi
Articles
Does the Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution require judges to exempt religious objectors from the application of nondiscriminatory and otherwise applicable laws? Over the last twenty years, judges and academics have debated fiercely whether the Clause should be interpreted to provide religiously observant citizens with a right to “free exercise exemptions.” The debate has led indirectly to a new interest in nineteenth-century views on free exercise jurisprudence. In this Article, I will examine the scholarship on nineteenth-century free exercise jurisprudence to date and ask what it adds to our understanding of the Clause and the question of exemptions.