Law Commons^™

Act Up/Anita Bryant/Drugs, Religion, And Law/Lambda Legal Defense And Education Fund/Right To Reply And Right Of The Press/Sincerity Of Religious Belief, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Six entries in the Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties (Paul Finkelman, ed.).

Defining Religion, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

The charge of this essay was to review definitional trends of "religion." Four major types were discussed: content, behavior, mental, and functional. While each type has considerations that suggest its relevance, all are incomplete when examined in isolation. Consequently, two approaches combining these types were briefly discussed: conjunctive and generative. Judging the former inferior to the latter, it was suggested that only the functional definitions are capable of being truly generative. The most inclusive definition of religion, therefore, will be one that is generative functional. Clues as to what such a definition might look like are found first in the …

Doma: An Unconstitutional Establishment Of Fundamentalist Christianity, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

This Article scrutinizes the constitutionality of the intent of the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA]. According to the text of the Act, DOMA's purposes are "to define and protect the institution of marriage," where marriage is defined to exclude same-sex partners. To be constitutionally valid under the Establishment Clause, this notion that heterosexual marriage requires "protection" from gay and lesbian persons must spring from a secular and not religious source. This Article posits that DOMA has crossed this forbidden line between the secular and the religious. DOMA, motivated and supported by fundamentalist Christian ideology, and lacking any genuine secular goals …

Restoring Free Exercise Protections By Limiting Them: Preventing A Repeat Of Smith, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith effectively removed all protections traditionally accorded the free exercise of religion. RFRA was designed to undo the effects of this decision by presumably setting back the clock of jurisprudence to the day before Smith. Even if RFRA is found to be constitutional, it will still, of itself, be ultimately ineffective since it undoes the effects of Smith without addressing the confluence of issues which made a decision like Smith likely. The clock may be set back, but without significant changes it can be expected to run forward again in much …

God Is As God Does: Law, Anthropology, And The Definition Of "Religion", James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

This Article first discusses the judicial deliberations upon the definition of religion. That discussion adopts a chronological sequence because, in legal matters, that is the one that counts.

It can be a tedious, but not particularly difficult task to summarize the legal struggle to define religion. The strategy applied to evaluate the product of that struggle is intellectual triangulation, whereby bearings from two fixed positions are used to specify that of that third. By analogy, the correct definition of "religion" can be identified by finding where the legal efforts intersect with an independent sighting of the same target. Where this …