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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 …