Religion Law Commons^™

An Ethnography Of Love Jihad: The Governance Of Interfaith Marriages In Times Of Hindutva, Snehal Sharma

Theses and Dissertations--Gender and Women's Studies

My doctoral research focuses on the violations of human and citizenship rights of women and religiously marginalized communities (based on religious differences) in the backdrop of right-wing movements in India. I assess the Hindu nationalist propaganda named “love jihad” to demonstrate the way it weaponizes religious exogamy. This propaganda legitimizes violence against Indian religious minorities and women as it claims that marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men are acts of terrorism against Hindus with the sole aim of increasing the Muslim population using Hindu women's bodies. I have used ethnographic research methods to explore the legal process of interfaith …

Church Autonomy, Textualism, And Originalism: Scotus’’S Use Of History To Give Definition To Church Autonomy Doctrine, Carl H. Esbeck

Marquette Law Review

Church autonomy is a First Amendment doctrine altogether distinct from the more familiar causes of action brought under the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. The principle of church autonomy was first recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in the post-Civil War case Watson v. Jones, holding that civil courts must not be drawn into resolving religious questions or settling disputes over church polity. And early this century, in the unanimous decision Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the theory of church autonomy took on its most fully developed form as a constitutional immunity …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons From History, Madison Condon

Seattle University Law Review

As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of …

Shareholder Expression In A Time Of Heightened Political Tension, Aaron A. Dhir

Seattle University Law Review

In this article, I provide context for my forthcoming research project on shareholder proposals and racial equity audits. Since the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, progressive shareholder actors have increasingly used the proposal mechanism to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice-related goals. These proposals have frequently gone beyond requesting the usual corporate fare of diversity trainings, intersectionality workshops, affinity groups, etc. Instead, a more ambitious type of proposal asks corporate America to conduct racial equity audits, defined as “an independent, objective and holistic analysis of a company’s policies, practices, products, services and efforts to combat systemic racism …

Corporate Governance Speech, Sarah C. Haan

Seattle University Law Review

The State has always regulated the intra-firm communications that make corporate governance possible, most commonly by mandating disclosures of information by a corporation to its shareholders. Some such laws are labeled “securities regulation,” but securities regulation is a broad category that extends to speech by actors who are outside the corporate enterprise as well. Also, the conventional securities regulation category does not capture all such laws; other examples, including informationforcing mandates, can be found in state corporate law. This Article uses the term “corporate governance speech” to describe the communications among shareholders, directors, and officers through which corporate governance is …

Dark Accounting Matter, Colleen Honigsberg

Seattle University Law Review

Physicists calculate that approximately 85% of the matter in the universe is composed of “dark matter” that “does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation and is therefore difficult to detect.” The S&P 500 currently trades at a price-to-book value of 4.2, suggesting that book value accounts for less than 20% of the S&P 500’s market value. The remaining 80% appears nowhere in these firms’ balance sheets—it is invisible to contemporary accounting techniques and constitutes “dark accounting matter.”

Some “dark accounting matter” is composed of factors commonly described as components of “ESG.” Human capital, for example, is an intangible asset …

The Employees’ Dilemma: Balancing Internal Reporting, Whistleblowing, And Insider Trading Risks, Geeyoung Min

Seattle University Law Review

The Essay examines how recent developments in insider trading regulations and whistleblower reward programs can lead to unintended and counterproductive results of discouraging employees from using internal reporting channels within corporate compliance programs. While the presence of a robust and well-functioning corporate compliance program is a critical factor both in mitigating the level of public enforcement actions against companies and in protecting corporate managers from liability in private litigation, these programs often provide little incentive for employees to report potential misconduct internally.

Corporate compliance programs are designed to promote the upward information flow within the company, which is essential for …

How The Antidiscrimination Law Of Commercial Transactions Really Works, Helen Norton

Seattle University Law Review

A variety of businesses now cite 303 Creative when seeking First Amendment protection for their refusal to serve certain customers based on those customers’ protected class status. How this litigation will play out remains to be seen. But future courts need not, and should not, repeat the 303 Creative Court’s misunderstanding of how the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions actually works.

Part I of this Essay explains the Court’s longstanding understanding of the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions, and then describes the Court’s failure to engage with this precedent in 303 Creative. Part II then identifies the 303 Creative decision’s …

Understanding The Big Three’S Wavering Support Of Environmental And Social Shareholder Proposals, Jeff Schwartz, Jefferson Jensen

Seattle University Law Review

Because of their substantial equity portfolios, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (the Big 3) are central players in corporate governance. It is, therefore, critical to understand how they vote. One puzzle is that their support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social matters appears to waiver. In 2020, for instance, BlackRock supported 11.1% of environmental proposals at S&P 500 firms. In 2021, it seemingly reversed course, supporting 55.2%. It then flipped again, supporting 32.1% in 2022. Such statistics suggest that the Big 3 are constantly changing their views on these topics. This Article seeks to better understand whether this is …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Right Not To Work: Unions And Title Vii, Seth Oranburg

FIU Law Review

This article explores how Title VII's mandate for religious accommodation conflicts with union seniority rights, as revealed in Groff v. DeJoy. It argues that labor unions often oppose Sabbath accommodations not out of hostility to religion, but to protect bargained-for entitlements. The piece highlights a growing legal tension: whether co-worker burdens count as “undue hardship” under Title VII—a question with major implications for religious liberty in unionized workplaces.

Green Dividends: A Case Study In Green Dividends And The Conditions For Private Ordering Solutions, Anne M. Tucker

Seattle University Law Review

This Essay introduces a novel private ordering solution to facilitate corporate investments in pro-social and environmental initiatives: Green dividends. Green dividends are an optional increase in shareholder dividends that are returned to the company to be reinvested in environmental initiatives or kept by a shareholder.

Green dividends pose an alternative to the current gridlocked debate that corporations can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, and shouldn’t even try to act in pro-social or environmental ways. Turning the common refrains on their head converts each narrative into an element for a successful private ordering solution: authority, accountability, shareholder buy-in, and government- backed enforcement. With Green …

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Right Not To Work: Unions And Title Vii, Seth C. Oranburg

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article explores how Title VII's mandate for religious accommodation conflicts with union seniority rights, as revealed in Groff v. DeJoy. It argues that labor unions often oppose Sabbath accommodations not out of hostility to religion, but to protect bargained-for entitlements. The piece highlights a growing legal tension: whether co-worker burdens count as “undue hardship” under Title VII—a question with major implications for religious liberty in unionized workplaces.

Private Religious Schools And Disability Discrimination, Kevin Timpe

Touro Law Review

In the lead-up to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), religious institutions and organizations lobbied to be exempt. Because they were successful in securing an exemption to most of the ADA’s requirements, religious private schools maintain the legal right to refuse admission to disabled students or to fail to give them various legal protections. After considering the arguments given in its favor, the paper critiques this exemption on moral grounds. It then suggests that these considerations should lead to a reexamination of the legal right such schools have to discriminate against disabled individuals, especially in those cases …

How To Teach A Course On Land Use And Anti-Jewish Discrimination, Michael Lewyn

FIU Law Review

In 2022, I was asked to teach a one-week mini-course within a broader course on “Structural Barriers and the Pursuit of Equity,” a course focusing on various forms of structural discrimination The course is typically taught by over a dozen professors from various parts of Touro University, each of whom teaches for a week on a different topic. I chose to teach on issues related to land use law (because my scholarship focuses on that area) and in particular how land use law has been used by and against traditionally observant Jews (because that is the religious tradition I am …

Sabbath Accommodations As A Civil Right: History, Title Vii, And The Path To Groff V. Dejoy, Isaac May

FIU Law Review

In Groff v. DeJoy, which concerned a Christian Sabbath observer, Jewish groups were vindicated by the Court’s overturning Hardison v. Transworld Airlines and strengthening Title VII’s protections for religion, particularly around employees’ Sabbath observance. This article positions Groff within the history of Jewish efforts to secure employment protections for Sabbath worship. Efforts to secure Sabbath accommodations were an outgrowth and expansion of early twentieth-century efforts to ensure Jews were protected by public accommodation laws and a product of attempts by litigators such as Leo Pfeffer to end mandatory Sunday closing laws in the mid-twentieth century. Sabbath accommodations became a critical …

Never Again: Zionism And The Jewess, Rona Kaufman

FIU Law Review

The State of Israel was established, in part, to ensure that Jews would never again be killed with impunity. More specifically, the State of Israel was established to ensure that never again would Jewish women and girls be systematically raped, assaulted, violated, and mutilated in a pogrom-like attack against the Jewish people. It is well known that the sweep of history connects Jews with the land of Israel from ancient times to today and serves as an important foundation for political Zionism. Less understood is that the atrocities against Jewish women and girls, committed over thousands of years and across …

Race Without Racism: Religious School Curricula And The Race-Neutral Legacy Of Brown, Vania Blaiklock

Scholarly Articles

Current conversations about race and equity curricula in primary and secondary education exclude examining religious curricula because of their private classification. Yet, this omission prevents us from exploring how religious curricula might mirror the legal transformation of Brown’s racial equality legacy to constitutional race neutrality. This Article brings religious curricula into these conversations by specifically linking the Court’s race-neutral transformation of Brown to the way religious curricula frame discussions about race without racism. Throughout the Article, I argue that the Court’s transformation of Brown is not just a top-down legal framework but also a bottom-up educational ideology. By making …

From Ambiguity To Accountability: The Case For A Legal Definition Of Antisemitism In Academia, Andrea Martin

Faculty Scholarship

Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, U.S. college campuses experienced a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents, driven by an antizionism movement aimed at demonizing and delegitimizing the Jewish state and its supporters. A congressional investigation found that antisemitism persisted at prominent universities because administrators repeatedly failed to denounce antizionist conduct that functions as a vehicle for harassment of Jewish students and neglected to enforce their own nondiscrimination policies. The congressional committee, as well as several university antisemitism task forces, identified antizionism as a primary driver of campus antisemitism and strongly recommended that university leaders recognize and address …

Private Religious Schools And Disability Discrimination, Kevin Timpe

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

In the lead-up to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), religious institutions and organizations lobbied to be exempt. Because they were successful in securing an exemption to most of the ADA’s requirements, religious private schools maintain the legal right to refuse admission to disabled students or to fail to give them various legal protections. After considering the arguments given in its favor, the paper critiques this exemption on moral grounds. It then suggests that these considerations should lead to a reexamination of the legal right such schools have to discriminate against disabled individuals, especially in those cases …

A Proxy For Piety: A Closer Look At Religious Cost In The Substantial Burden Inquiry, Philip Andrew B. Wines

Fordham Law Review Online

This Comment discusses whether the Establishment Clause and “religious question” doctrine prohibit courts from considering the subjective religious harm suffered by free exercise claimants when determining if laws impose a “substantial burden” on the claimant, as defined by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). It explores a dilemma that courts are presently facing. They must choose either to wade into constitutionally perilous theological debates to decide cases on their merits, or to defer to free exercise claimants on their own assertions of substantial burden and risk swallowing up the law …

Dejoyful Noise: Reimagining Title Vii Religious Accommodations In The Wake Of Groff V. Dejoy, Mikko Biana

Brooklyn Law Review

The prominence of religion in everyday life has dwindled in recent decades. The number of Americans who attend weekly religious services continues to decline, and wide swaths of the population now profess irreligion altogether. Despite this trend, constitutional mandates such as the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses remind society that throughout history and into the present day, the relationship between religion and state has been and always will be ripe for discussion. The 2023 Supreme Court decision Groff v. DeJoy exemplifies this characterization. Prior to Groff, the Court primarily relied on a 1977 case, Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison, …

Statutory Religious Accommodation In Employment And The Problems Of Judicial Intent And Outcome, George Wright

Texas A&M Law Review

The Groff v. DeJoy case unhappily, but inevitably, generates a variety of realistically unresolvable fundamental problems in typical statutory religious accommodation cases. Perhaps even more important, though, are the unintended and perverse results of Groff’s placing a generally heavier burden of religious accommodation on employers. The Groff standard indeed incentivizes the bringing of more religious discrimination cases, and both the winning and losing of such cases by religious claimants. But our adversarial cultural circumstances, including the typical inseparability of religion, politics, and culture, crucially affect the actual, but unintended, results of judicial reforms. The Groff rule is likely to …

Can Human Rights Be Reconciled With Citizenship: Reconsidering Marx's Zur Judenfrage Today, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay critically re-examines Marx’s youthful analysis of the separation of church and state and his complex views about the function of rights in the modern state. I argue that Marx’s condemnation of Christian nationalism and endorsement of citizenship for Jews is consistent with his view that the modern, secular state cannot emancipate itself entirely from religiosity, as evidenced by the continuing legacy of nationalism and cultural identity politics today. Although Marx correctly follows Hegel in identifying modernity with a structural differentiation between civil society and state, I argue that he misunderstands the nature of this separation and, along with …

American Evangelicalism And The Status Of Women: Biblical Interpretation, Politicization, And A Future For Secularism, Ivy Macneil Blackwood

University Honors Theses

American evangelicalism has positioned itself as a dominant force in social policy since the 1970s and has continued to grow over time. During Carter's presidency, the Religious Right, a neoconservative political identity of fundamentalist beliefs, emerged with the intention to homogenize American culture by infusing literal interpretations of biblical Scripture with American exceptionalism. With the help of charismatic leaders like Billy Graham, the political manifestations of American evangelicalism's fundamentalist beliefs have been solidified through conservative legislation and Christian demographic dominance in Congress and the Supreme Court. Women have been particularly burdened by evangelical institutionalization, as access to socioeconomic and political …

Egypt’S Legal Modernism: Challenging The National Discourse, Mohamed A. El-Deeb

Theses and Dissertations

Egypt’s legal modernity is the story of the modern Egyptian state itself. Reforming the country’s judiciary in the late nineteenth century was meant to achieve ambitious aims beyond the functionality of a justice system. The utmost goal was the country’s independence from the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. The judicial reforms modernized the Egyptian state and built a judiciary and legal community like no other place. Egypt achieved its independent judiciary before gaining its political independence. That was a remarkable achievement of the judicial reform. That rich part of Egypt’s modern history is negated and disregarded from public awareness. Not …