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Full-Text Articles in Law
Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami
Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
A mystery of faith is a truth of religion that escapes human understanding. The mysteries of religion are not truths that human beings happen not to know, or truths that they could know with sufficient study and application, but instead truths that they cannot know in the nature of things. In the Letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes that as a Christian apostle, his holy office is to “bring to completion for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.” Note that Paul does not say that his task is to make …
The New Disestablishments, Marc O. Degirolami
The New Disestablishments, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
The individual has the autonomy of choice respecting matters of sex, gender, and procreation. The findings of science as established by the knowledge class, together with the policy preferences of that class in this domain, should be imposed on everyone. These propositions reflect two central creeds of what this Article calls the "new establishment." They, or statements like them, are the basis for policies across the nation touching many walks of life, from business to education, media, advertising, science, healthcare and medicine, and more.
Whether these propositions constitute a "religious" establishment turns out to be an irrelevant distraction. To …
Establishment’S Political Priority To Free Exercise, Marc O. Degirolami
Establishment’S Political Priority To Free Exercise, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
Americans are beset by disagreement about the First Amendment. Progressive scholars are attacking the venerable liberal view that First Amendment rights must not be constricted to secure communal, political benefits. To prioritize free speech rights, they say, reflects an unjust inflation of individual interest over our common political commitments. These disagreements afflict the Religion Clauses as well. Critics claim that religious exemption has become more important than the values of disestablishment that define the polity. Free exercise exemption, they argue, has subordinated establishment.
This Article contests these views. The fundamental rules and norms constituting the political regime—what the Article calls …
Clouded Precedent: Tandon V. Newsom And Its Implications For The Shadow Docket, Alexander Gouzoules
Clouded Precedent: Tandon V. Newsom And Its Implications For The Shadow Docket, Alexander Gouzoules
Faculty Publications
The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”—the decisions issued outside its procedures for deciding cases on the merits—has drawn increasing attention and criticism from scholars, commentators, and elected representatives. Shadow docket decisions have been criticized on the grounds that they are made without the benefit of full briefing and argument, and because their abbreviated, per curiam opinions can be difficult for lower courts to interpret.
A spate of shadow docket decisions in the context of free-exercise challenges to COVID-19 public health orders culminated in Tandon v. Newsom, a potentially groundbreaking decision that may upend longstanding doctrines governing claims brought under the Free …
The New Thoreaus, Mark L. Movsesian
The New Thoreaus, Mark L. Movsesian
Faculty Publications
Fifty years ago, in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court famously indicated that “religion” denotes a communal rather than a purely individual phenomenon. An organized group like the Amish would qualify as religious, the Court wrote, but a solitary seeker like the nineteenth century transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau would not. At the time, the question was mostly peripheral; hardly any Americans claimed to have their own, personal religions that would make it difficult for them to comply with civil law. In the intervening decades, though, American religion has changed. One-fifth of us—roughly sixty-six million people—now claim, like Thoreau, to …
First Amendment Traditionalism, Marc O. Degirolami
First Amendment Traditionalism, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
Traditionalist constitutional interpretation takes political and cultural practices of long age and duration as constituting the presumptive meaning of the text. This Essay probes traditionalism's conceptual and normative foundations. It focuses on the Supreme Court's traditionalist interpretation of the First Amendment to understand the distinctive justifications for traditionalism and the relationship between traditionalism and originalism. The first part of the Essay identifies and describes traditionalism in some of the Court's Speech and Religion Clause jurisprudence, highlighting its salience in the Court's recent Establishment Clause doctrine.
Part II develops two justfications for traditionalism: "interpretive" and "democratic-populist." The interpretive justification is that …
Justice Jackson In The Jehovah's Witnesses' Cases, John Q. Barrett
Justice Jackson In The Jehovah's Witnesses' Cases, John Q. Barrett
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
I will address Justice Jackson and Jehovah’s Witnesses in four parts. First, I will begin with Robert Jackson himself, introducing the man who became a Supreme Court Justice, and who came to author Barnette and at least one other very notable opinion in a Jehovah’s Witness case. Second, I will turn to the Barnette case in its Supreme Court legal context, which turns out to be two Court terms, 1941–42 and 1942–43, of many Jehovah’s Witnesses cases. These cases produced a run of Court decisions that are a framework surrounding Barnette, and thus understanding them is important to …
Kennedy's Last Term: A Report On The 2017-2018 Supreme Court, Marc O. Degirolami, Kevin C. Walsh
Kennedy's Last Term: A Report On The 2017-2018 Supreme Court, Marc O. Degirolami, Kevin C. Walsh
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
Twenty-eighteen brought the end of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s tenure on the Supreme Court. We are now entering a period of uncertainty about American constitutional law. Will we remain on the trajectory of the last half-century? Or will the Court move in a different direction?
The character of the Supreme Court in closely divided cases is often a function of the median justice. The new median justice will be Chief Justice John Roberts if Kennedy’s replacement is a conservative likely to vote most often with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito. This will mark a new phase of …
Regulating Offensiveness: Snyder V. Phelps, Emotion, And The First Amendment, Christina E. Wells
Regulating Offensiveness: Snyder V. Phelps, Emotion, And The First Amendment, Christina E. Wells
Faculty Publications
In its upcoming term, the Court will decide in Snyder v. Phelps whether Albert Snyder can sue the Reverend Fred Phelps and other members of the Westboro Baptist Church for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress for protesting near his son’s funeral. Those arguing in favor of tort liability claim that the Phelps’ speech during a time of mourning and vulnerability is especially outrageous and injurious and that the First Amendment allows such regulation. Their arguments, however, effectively rely on the offensiveness of the Phelps’ message rather than on any external indicia of harm, such as noisy …