Religion Law Commons^™

Lamas, Oracles, Channels, And The Law: Reconsidering Religion And Social Theory, Rebecca Redwood French

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

God, Labor, And The Law: The Pursuit Of Religious Equality In Northern Ireland's Workforce, Jane H. Thorpe

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In Northern Ireland, a Catholic man is twice as likely to be unemployed as his Protestant counterpart. This employment differential can be attributed directly to the religious sectarianism that has plagued Northern Ireland for almost 400 years. Traditionally, the Protestant community has used economic rights and employment opportunities to maintain its power and authority over the Catholic community. Resolution of this employment differential would be a key step toward achieving peace and unity in Northern Ireland; however, no progress can be made toward this goal until both communities share economic benefits and hardships. In 1989, the British Parliament passed the …

Private Religious Choice In German And American Constitutional Law: Government Funding And Government Religious Speech, Ingrid B. Wuerth

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

We will never face Germany's specific problems of religion and government, arising as they do from its particular history. The sharply contested religion cases from Germany in the late 1990s do, however, point to problems with our growing reliance on private religious choice analysis that demand our attention in both government funding and speech cases. To understand the problems of funding religious groups in neutral programs, we must back up and ask the foundational question: what goals may the government pursue with its funding? The broader those goals are defined, the greater the potential distortion of private religious choice, through …

Faith Tends To Subvert Legal Order, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Two old friends and colleagues died in the spring of 1997. Both share with me a Baptist boyhood and a Roman Catholic middle age. Both showed me that the relevance of religion to a lawyer's work is best approached with believers' irony.

Frank Booker, descendant of Cherokee Indians, Missouri farmers, railroaders, and Baptist ministers, taught law at Stetson and then Notre Dame, with a style all his own and with a steady eye on how important the law is. After his funeral, one of his students remembered for me a day in Frank's first-year torts class. They were several weeks …

Power And The Subject Of Religion, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

Under the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Nevertheless, congressional actors have on occasion enacted laws that expressly make religion the subject of legislation. Many scholars justify these laws on the grounds that Congress at the time of the Founding had an implied power to legislate on religion if necessary and proper to an enumerated end.

Professor Lash argues that the "implied power" theory cannot withstand historical scrutiny. Whatever "implied power" arguments may have emanated from the original Constitution, those arguments were foreclosed by the adoption of the …

Legal Reform: Reviewing Human Rights In The Muslim World, Azizah Y. Al-Hibri

Law Faculty Publications

Muslims take spirituality very seriously and would be willing to put up with a great deal of pain and suffering rather than abandon this fundamental disposition. Additionally, many Muslims have an intuitive belief that it is not religion which is at fault, but those in power. Consequently, they continue to search for the spiritually acceptable solution. In the meantime, Western NGOs offer no more than lightly-modified Western secular solutions, sometimes thinly disguised with religious rhetoric.

Hands Off! Civil Court Involvement In Conflicts Over Religious Property, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Kent Greenawalt explores how civil courts can constitutionally resolve conflicts over religious property. Although the practical and theoretical significance of this part of First Amendment law has often been overlooked, issues concerning church property continue to raise difficulties for both the courts charged with their resolution and the church members who wish to avoid the courts' intervention entirely. This Article argues that the general approach of noninvolvement that the Supreme Court has advocated in this area is consonant with broader themes in religion clause adjudication. Within this more general approach, Professor Greenawalt considers the two alternative …

The Legality Of The Religious Use Of Peyote By The Native American Church: A Commentary On The Free Exercise, Equal Protection, And Establishment Issues Raised By The Peyote Way Church Of God Case, John Thomas Bannon Jr.

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Talking About Religion In The Language Of The Law: Impossible But Necessary, James Boyd White

Articles

In speaking to this conference about religion and law I am in a decidedly peculiar position, for it may be that every one of you has thought longer and harder about the relation between these two forms of life than I have. When Scott Idleman first asked me to talk to you, I explained that I was no expert, to put it mildly, and that the most that I could offer would be the reflections of a neophyte. He said that this was fine-perhaps he was just desperate for a speaker; perhaps he thought that it might be helpful to …

Response To Judging Religion By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (Symposium: Religion And The Judicial Process: Legal, Ethical, And Empirical Dimensions), James Boyd White

Articles

In her paper Professor Sullivan sets forth an admirable ideal: that we in the law should talk about religion as a distinctive human activity, without either engaging in theology ourselves or erasing what is important about religion. We: should, in her words, learn to acknowledge religion without establishing it. For this activity, as she has also argued in Paying the Words Extra, the discipline of the history of religion can serve as a model, for there too people strive to reflect what is distinctive about religion without committing themselves to the validity of a particular theology or set of religious …

The Status Of Constitutional Religious Liberty At The End Of The Millennium, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

I have the privilege of introducing the 1998 Bums Lecture Symposium- Religious Liberty in the Next Millennium: Should We Amend the Religion Clauses of the United States Constitution? My role in this Symposium is to acquaint you with the religion clauses of the Constitution- where they came from- where they've been- and where they seem to be today. Our Symposium contributors, Professors Kent Greenawalt and Robert George will discuss just where they think the religion clauses should go in the future.

Judicial Supremacy And The Settlement Function, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …