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Full-Text Articles in Law
We The People (Of Faith): The Supremacy Of Religious Rights In The Shadow Of A Pandemic, Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Katherine M. Franke, Lilia Hadjiivanova
We The People (Of Faith): The Supremacy Of Religious Rights In The Shadow Of A Pandemic, Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Katherine M. Franke, Lilia Hadjiivanova
Faculty Scholarship
Late on a Friday evening in April 2021, over a year into the COVID-19 crisis, the Supreme Court issued a brief opinion that dramatically transformed constitutional law. In the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, the Court ruled in Tandon v. Newsom that state and local governments seeking to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus may not restrict in-person religious gatherings more rigorously than any other type of activity, such as shopping for groceries or working at a warehouse. The opinion was only one in a barrage of cases filed in federal courts across the country — many …
(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene
(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene
Faculty Scholarship
Within U.S. constitutional culture, courts stand curiously apart from the society in which they sit. Among the many purposes this process of alienation serves is to “neutralize” the cognitive dissonance produced by Americans’ current self-conception and the role our forebears’ social and political culture played in producing historic injustice. The legal culture establishes such dissonance in part by structuring American constitutional argument around anticanonical cases: most especially “Dred Scott v. Sandford,” “Plessy v. Ferguson,” and “Lochner v. New York.” The widely held view that these decisions were “wrong the day they were decided” emphasizes the role of independent courts in …
The Story Of Bob Jones University V. United States: Race, Religion, And Congress' Extraordinary Acquiescence, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
The Story Of Bob Jones University V. United States: Race, Religion, And Congress' Extraordinary Acquiescence, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
On May 25, 1983, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had authority to deny tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University, Goldsboro Christian School, and other private and religious schools with racially discriminatory educational policies. The Court relied on the statute’s broad purpose and placed significant weight on Congress’ failure to enact legislation to overturn the IRS policy. A complete account of the legislative history, provided here, both supports and undercuts the Court’s opinion. More importantly, this story provides an account of the dynamic interaction among a Supreme Court critical of racial integration, a …
The Sit-Ins And The Failed State Action Revolution, Christopher W. Schmidt
The Sit-Ins And The Failed State Action Revolution, Christopher W. Schmidt
Studio for Law and Culture
This article revises the traditional account of why the Supreme Court, when faced in the early 1960s with a series of cases arising out of the lunch counter sit-in movement, refused to hold racial discrimination in public accommodations unconstitutional. These cases are the great aberration of the Warren Court. At a time when the justices confidently reworked one constitutional doctrine after another, often in response to the moral challenges of the civil rights movement and often in the face of considerable public resistance, they broke pattern in the sit-in cases. And they did so despite a transformation in popular opinion …