Law Commons^™

The Worst Choice For School Choice: Tuition Tax Credits Are A Bad Idea And Direct Funding Is Wiser, Michael J. Broyde, Anna G. Gabianelli

Faculty Articles

School choice is on the rise, and states use various mechanisms to implement it. One prevalent mechanism is also a uniquely problematic one: the tax credit. Tax credits are deficient at equitably distributing a benefit like school choice; they are costly, and they invite fraud. Instead of using tax credits, states opting for school choice programs should use direct funding. Direct funding will more efficiently achieve the goals of school choice because it can be regulated like any other government benefit, even if it ends up subsidizing religious private schools.

Tax credits’ prevalence is not inexplicable, of course. It is …

The Common Law And First Amendment Qualified Right Of Public Access To Foreign Intelligence Law, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For millennia, public access to the law has been the hallmark of rule of law. To be legally and morally binding, rules must be promulgated. Citizens’ knowledge of the law, in turn, serves as the lynchpin for democratic governance. In common law countries, it is more than just the statutory provisions and their execution that matters: how courts rule, and the reasoning behind their determination, proves central. Accordingly, in the United States, both common law and the right to petition incorporated in the First Amendment have long enshrined a presumed right of public right of access to Article III opinions …

Foreword: New Supreme Court Cases: Duquesne Law Faculty Explains, Wilson Huhn

Law Faculty Publications

On September 30, 2022, several members of the faculty of the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University presented a Continuing Legal Education program, New Supreme Court Cases: Duquesne Law Faculty Explains, reviewing these developments. Duquesne Law Review graciously invited the faculty panel to contribute their analysis of these cases from the Supreme Court's 2021- 2022 term for inclusion in this symposium issue of the Law Review.

The New Fourth Era Of American Religious Freedom, John Witte Jr., Eric Wang

Faculty Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court has entered decisively into a new fourth era of American religious freedom. In the first era, from 1776 to 1940, the Court largely left governance of religious freedom to the individual states and did little to enforce the First Amendment Religion Clauses. In the second era, from 1940 to 1990, the Court “incorporated” the First Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause and applied both a strong Free Exercise Clause and a strong Establishment Clause against federal, state, and local governments alike. In the third era, from the mid-1980s to 2010, the Court softened the …

Presuming Trustworthiness, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

A half-century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court often praised speakers performing the press function. While the Justices acknowledged that press reports are sometimes inaccurate and that media motivations are at times less than public-serving, their laudatory statements nonetheless embraced a baseline presumption of the value and trustworthiness of press speech in general. Speech in the exercise of the press function, they told us, is vitally important to public discourse in a democracy and therefore worthy of protection even when it falls short of the ideal in a given instance. Those days are over. Our study of every reference to the …

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 …

Nobody's Business: A Novel Theory Of The Anonymous First Amendment, Jordan Wallace-Wolf

Faculty Scholarship

Namelessness is a double-edged sword. It can be a way of avoiding prejudice and focusing attention on one's ideas, but it can also be a license to defame and misinform. These points have been widely discussed. Still, the breadth of these discussions has left some of the depths unplumbed, because rarely is the question explicitly faced: what is the normative significance of namelessness itself, as opposed to its effects under different conditions? My answer is that anonymity is an evasion of responsibility for one's conduct. Persons should ordinarily be held responsible for what they do, but in some cases, where …

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

Self-Determination In American Discourse: The Supreme Court’S Historical Indoctrination Of Free Speech And Expression, Jarred Williams

Honors Theses

Within the American criminal legal system, it is a well-established practice to presume the innocence of those charged with criminal offenses unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Such a judicial framework-like approach, called a legal maxim, is utilized in order to ensure that the law is applied and interpreted in ways that legislative bodies originally intended.

The central aim of this piece in relation to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution is to investigate whether the Supreme Court of the United States has utilized a specific legal maxim within cases that dispute government speech or expression regulation. …

In Contracts We Trust (And No One Can Change Their Mind)! There Should Be No Special Treatment For Religious Arbitration, Michael J. Broyde, Alexa J. Windsor

Faculty Articles

The recent article In God We Trust (Unless We Change Our Mind): How State of Mind Relates to Religious Arbitration ("In God We Trust") proposes that those who sign arbitration agreements that consent to a religious legal system as the basis of the rules of arbitration be allowed to back out of such agreements based on their constitutional right to free exercise. This article is a response and is divided into two sections. In the first section, we show that such an exemption would violate the Federal Arbitration Act's (FAA) basic rules preventing the states from heightened regulation of arbitration …

Kent State And The Failure Of First Amendment Law, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided its first free speech case 100 years ago, two very different eras have defined First Amendment law. For a half century, before 1970, the Supreme Court focused on protecting the expressive freedom of political dissidents and social reformers. In 1970, amid protests against the Vietnam War, the Ohio National Guard senselessly gunned down four students at Kent State University. The Kent State massacre exposed the fragility in our country of political protest, free speech, and democracy itself. That atrocity should have inspired First Amendment law to affirm and enhance its protection of dissenters and …

Curing The First Amendment Scrutiny Muddle Through A Breyer-Based Blend Up? Toward A Less Categorical, More Values-Oriented Approach For Selecting Standards Of Judicial Review, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article argues that the United States Supreme Court should significantly alter its current categorical approach for discerning standards of judicial review in free-speech cases. The present system should become nondeterminative and be augmented with a modified version of Justice Stephen Breyer’s long-preferred proportionality framework. Specifically, the Article’s proposed tack fuses facets of today’s policy, which largely pivots on distinguishing content-based laws from content-neutral laws and letting that categorization determine scrutiny, with a more nuanced, values-and-interests methodology. A values-and-interests formula would allow the Court to climb up or down the traditional ladder of scrutiny rungs – strict, intermediate or rational …

Hands-Off Religion In The Early Months Of Covid-19, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

For decades, scholars have documented the United States Supreme Court’s “hands-off approach” to questions of religious practice and belief, pursuant to which the Court has repeatedly declared that judges are precluded from making decisions that require evaluating and determining the substance of religious doctrine. At the same time, many scholars have criticized this approach, for a variety of reasons. The early months of the COVID-19 outbreak brought these issues to the forefront, both directly, in disputes over limitations on religious gatherings due to the virus, and indirectly, as the Supreme Court decided important cases turning on religious doctrine. Taken together, …

Is The Establishment Clause Asymmetrical?, Sam Foer

Senior Honors Projects

Through numerous Establishment Clause cases, the Supreme Court has concluded that when public educators promote or denigrate religious views in the K-12 classroom, they violate the First Amendment. The Court has found that the protection of ‘freedom of conscience’ is embedded in the purpose of the Establishment Clause, which applies most strictly to the public school setting. This is because the sphere of conscience is most vulnerable to invasion in developing minds, and children are in a captive environment at school - they cannot escape from State instruction. Thus, states, school systems, and teachers who impose their religious beliefs onto …

The Supreme Court's Facilitation Of White Christian Nationalism, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

Doug Jager, a band student of Native-American ancestry, complained about the Christian prayers at his Georgia public school’s football games. Rather than address his concerns, the school lectured him on Christianity and proposed an alternative that appeared neutral yet would result in the continuation of the Christian prayers. In striking down the school’s proposal, Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. understood some of the ramifications of state-sponsored Christianity.

Despite Supreme Court rulings limiting Christian invocations at public-school events, government-sponsored Christian prayers and Christian symbols remain plentiful in the United States. This proliferation of government-sponsored Christianity around the country both reflects and …

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 …

The Supreme Court’S Two Constitutions: A First Look At The “Reverse Polarity” Cases, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

In the traditional approach to ideological classification, “liberal” judicial decisions are those that support civil liberties claims; “conservative” decisions are those that reject them. That view – particularly associated with the Warren Court era – is reflected in numerous academic writings and even an article by a prominent liberal judge. Today, however, there is mounting evidence that the traditional assumptions about the liberal-conservative divide are incorrect or at best incomplete. In at least some areas of constitutional law, the traditional characterizations have been reversed. Across a wide variety of constitutional issues, support for claims under the Bill of Rights or …

John Quincy Adams Influence On Washington’S Farewell Address: A Critical Examination, Stephen Pierce

Undergraduate Research

John Quincy Adams is seen by the American public today as a failed one-term president. When one starts to see his diplomatic work and his service in Congress, however, he becomes one of the most important figures in American history. The diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis was in 1944 the first historian to suggest that Adams’ early writings influenced Washington’s Farewell Address. He looked through some of Adams’ early published writings and concluded that it was, “Conspicuous among the admonitions of the Farewell Address are: (1) to exalt patriotically the national words, America, American, Americans; (2) to beware of foreign …

Christian Legislative Prayers And Christian Nationalism, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

No abstract provided.

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

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 …

Why Did Liberals Join The Majority In The Masterpiece Case?, Katherine A. Shaw

Online Publications

It was no surprise that Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has cast the decisive vote in so many important Supreme Court cases, wrote Monday’s majority opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The court ruled in favor of a Colorado baker named Jack Phillips who, on religious grounds, had refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

We’Ve Come A Long Way (Baby)! Or Have We? Evolving Intellectual Freedom Issues In The Us And Florida, L. Bryan Cooper, A.D. Beman-Cavallaro

Works of the FIU Libraries

This paper analyzes a shifting landscape of intellectual freedom (IF) in and outside Florida for children, adolescents, teens and adults. National ideals stand in tension with local and state developments, as new threats are visible in historical, legal, and technological context. Examples include doctrinal shifts, legislative bills, electronic surveillance and recent attempts to censor books, classroom texts, and reading lists.

Privacy rights for minors in Florida are increasingly unstable. New assertions of parental rights are part of a larger conservative animus. Proponents of IF can identify a lessening of ideals and standards that began after doctrinal fruition in the 1960s …

Is There Any Silver Lining To Trinity Lutheran Church, Inc. V. Comer?, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

No abstract provided.

To Speak Or Not To Speak, That Is Your Liberty: Janus V. Afscme, David Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Some Supreme Court precedents go through extensive death spasms before being interred. Lochner v. New York, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce come to mind. Others like Chisholm v. Georgia and Minersville School District v. Gobitis incurred a swift and summary execution. Still others, overtaken by subsequent cases, remain wraith-like presences among the Court’s past acts: Beauharnais v. Illinois and Buck v. Bell, for example, remain “on the books.”

Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment has been its strongest antiregulatory tool in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this Essay, part of a Columbia Law Review Symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the antiregulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market efficiency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is antistatist fear of entrenchment …

Newsroom: Is Wall Between Church And State Crumbling? 10-10-2017, Diana Hassel

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.