Law Commons^™

Reclaiming Establishment: Identity And The ‘Religious Equality Problem’, Faraz Sanei

Faculty Scholarship

Since at least 2017, the Court has implicitly recognized a right of equal access to generally available public benefits based on the beneficiary's religious identity or status. In Carson v. Makin (2022), the Court went a step further and, for the first time, concluded that the “status-use distinction lacks a meaningful application” in both theory and practice. It then held that restrictions on the use of public benefits for sacral purposes amount to religious discrimination because they impose substantial burdens on free exercise rights. Carson's holding, and the rationale underlying it, contravene settled case law and effectively gut the Establishment …

Speech And Exercise By Private Individuals And Organizations, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

A central issue about redundancy concerns how far the exercise of religion is simply a form of speech that is, and should be, constitutionally protected only to the extent that reaches speech generally. Insofar as a constitutional analysis leaves flexibility, we have questions about wise legislative choices. To consider these issues carefully, we need to have a sense of what counts as relevant speech and the exercise of religion. That is the focus of this article.

It addresses the basic categorization of what counts as “speech” for freedom of speech and what counts as religious exercise when each is engaged …

Women And The Free Exercise Clause: Some Thoughts About A (Religious) Feminist Reading, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

Among the dozens of Supreme Court cases on the free exercise of religion, women play a mostly invisible part. We know of Adell Sherbert and Frieda Yoder; and less famously, Alma Lovell, Lillian Gobitis, Paula Hobbie, Sarah Prince, and Lucie McClure. We know that these women go out into the streets to tell the Good News, refuse to salute idols, refuse to work on the Sabbath, and refuse to go to school in violation of their religion. But, we do not hear their voices very loudly.

At the same time, until recently, we have consistently heard only one woman's voice …

Rfra Exemptions From The Contraception Mandate: An Unconstitutional Accommodation Of Religion, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Rebecca G. Van Tassell

Faculty Scholarship

Litigation surrounding use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to exempt employers from the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” is moving steadily towards resolution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Both opponents and supporters of the mandate, however, have overlooked the Establishment Clause limits on such exemptions.

The heated religious-liberty rhetoric aimed at the mandate has obscured that RFRA is a “permissive” rather than “mandatory” accommodation of religion — a government concession to religious belief and practice that is not required by the Free Exercise Clause. Permissive accommodations must satisfy Establishment Clause constraints, notably the requirement that the accommodation not impose …

Some Thoughts On The First Amendment's Religion Clauses And Abner Greene's Against Obligation, With Reference To Patton Oswalt's Character 'Paul From Staten Island' In The Film Big Fan, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

In this short contribution to a symposium held at Boston University in the fall of 2012, I review Abner Greene's recent book Against Obligation by considering whether Greene's broad theory of freedom from state obligations under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment would protect the maniacal New York Giants fan "Paul from Staten Island," portrayed by the ridiculously talented Patton Oswalt in Robert Siegel's hilarious film "Big Fan." I also explain how I use the film in my Law and Religion class to teach the Free Exercise Clause and the deeply perplexing question of how the word "religion" …

With Religious Liberty For All: A Defense Of The Affordable Care Act's Contraception Coverage Mandate, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

The “contraception mandate” of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 poses a straightforward question for religious liberty jurisprudence: Must government excuse a believer from complying with a religiously burdensome law, when doing so would violate the liberty of others by imposing on them the costs and consequences of religious beliefs that they do not share? To ask this question is to answer it: One's religious liberty does not include the right to interfere with the liberty of others, and thus religious liberty may not be used by a religious employer to force employees to pay the costs …

Secularism, Religion, And Liberal Democracy In The United States, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is divided into three categories: some brief remarks about forms of secularism, an outline of American constitutional law as it relates to religion, and a discussion from the standpoint of political philosophy of the proper place of religion (and other similar perspectives) in making political decisions within liberal democracies. Because the audience for whom the oral comments from which the essay is derived was mainly non-American, the middle part of the essay sets out many propositions familiar to anyone acquainted with this branch of constitutional law. And because of the informal nature of the original presentation, I offer …

Common Sense About Original And Subsequent Understanding Of The Religion Clauses, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is mainly about the Establishment Clause, but it covers analogous questions about free exercise as well. I try to untangle the threads of various controversies, concentrating primarily on what seems fairly resolvable on examination, while also noting uncertainties that do not yield to easy analysis. I ask how constitutional language should have been and should be interpreted, adopting a strategy that gives weight to ordinary meaning and to the general sense of why that language was adopted. I do not eschew reference to legislative history; however for our purposes in this Essay, legislative history turns out to be …

Apparent Consistency Of Religion Clause Doctrine, The The Rehnquist Court And The First Amendment, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

A hallmark of religion clause scholarship is the complaint that the doctrine is a hopeless muddle. However, the Rehnquist Court brought a considerable amount of consistency-well, apparent consistency- to the doctrine. I say "apparent consistency" because, just as a paradox is only a seeming contradiction, so was the Rehnquist Court's religion clause jurisprudence only seemingly consistent. The doctrine focuses on whether the government singles out religion for special benefit (generally problematic under the Establishment Clause) or for special burden (generally problematic under the Free Exercise Clause). If, on the other hand, the government benefits religion as part of a more …

Religion And The Rehnquist Court, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This summary Article pays predominant attention to what the Rehnquist Court has altered. It slights a significant range of continuity. That includes the Court's strong rejection of laws that discriminate among religions or that target religious practices and the Court's inhospitable response to religious exercises that are sponsored by public schools. Although "continuity" may be a misleading term for subjects a court has not addressed, the Supreme Court has not touched the law regarding judicial involvement in church property disputes since Rehnquist became Chief Justice, and nothing it has decided presages an obvious shift in that jurisprudence.

Should The Religion Clauses Of The Constitution Be Amended?, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Our subject, whether the religion clauses of the federal constitution should be amended, goes to the heart of relations between government and the practice of religion in our society. These relations deeply affect the health of both religion and government. When public officials persecute some religions and embrace others, the risks are political tyranny and rigid, unthinking, unfeeling, vapid religion. No one wishes that fate for us.

When most people ask whether the religion clauses should be amended, they are really asking whether judicial interpretations have become so misguided that Congress and state legislatures should intervene and invoke the cumbersome …

The Political Balance Of The Religion Clauses, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

When the Supreme Court held in Employment Division v. Smith that the Free Exercise Clause does not protect religious practices from otherwise valid laws that incidentally burden those practices, it followed a particular theory of democratic politics. That some laws might unintentionally burden certain religious practices is, said the Court, an "unavoidable consequence of democratic government [that] must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself." The Court was certainly right in one sense: To claim that conscientious objection to an otherwise valid law should exempt one from that law is to claim that …