Religion Law Commons^™

The Need For A Law Of Church And Market, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

This Essay uses Helfand and Richman’s fine article to raise the question of the law of church and market. In Part I, I argue that the question of religion’s proper relationship to the market is more than simply another aspect of the church-state debates. Rather, it is a topic deserving explicit reflection in its own right. In Part II, I argue that Helfand and Richman demonstrate the danger of creating the law of church and market by accident. Courts and legislators do this when they resolve questions religious commerce poses by applying legal theories developed without any thought for the …

Return To Political Theology, Joshua D. Hawley

Faculty Publications

There was a time when theology was called the "queen of the sciences." From the beginnings of the university in the High Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, theology formed the backbone of liberal instruction at institutions of higher learning. Those days are long past. What remains of theological investigation in most major American universities has been trans- posed into the study of religion and safely sequestered in "religious studies" departments. Few undergraduates today encounter theology as a discipline-and as for law students, well, the idea that theology might have some relevance for the study of law is regarded in …

Rethinking The “Religious-Question” Doctrine, Christopher C. Lund

Pepperdine Law Review

The “religious question” doctrine is a well-known and commonly accepted notion about the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses. The general idea is that, in our system of separated church and state, courts do not decide religious questions. And from this premise, many things flow — including the idea that courts must dismiss otherwise justiciable controversies when they would require courts to resolve religious questions. Yet a vexing thought arises. The religious-question doctrine traditionally comes out of a notion that secular courts cannot resolve metaphysical or theological issues. But when one looks at the cases that courts have been dismissing pursuant to …

Doe V. Elmbrook School District And The Importance Of Refocusing Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Julie M. Karaba

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Telescoping And Collectivizing Religious Free Exercise Rights, Henry L. Chambers Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

If courts are willing to expand religious liberty so that people may be allowed to choose-on the basis of their own religious beliefs-whether certain laws will apply to non-religious entities they create, those courts should take that step very carefully. This Paper explores the issue and pro- ceeds as follows. Part I discusses three recent Supreme Court cases that il- luminate the telescoping and the collectivization of free exercise rights. Part II considers problems that accompany telescoping and collectivizing free exercise rights. Part III suggests how courts should critically evaluate the telescoping and collectivizing of free exercise rights. This Paper …

Catholic Social Thought And Human Rights, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

As the dominant moral vocabulary of modernity, the language of human rights establishes significant points of contact between the religious and the secular. Yet, the human rights movement increasingly finds itself in a contested relationship with religious ideas and communities. Even as it draws on the inherited moral resources of religion, the human rights movement, at least in its dominant institutional and intellectual expressions, presents itself as a totalizing moral theory that challenges countervailing theological accounts of human rights. This article considers the distinctive account of human rights that has emerged within Catholic social teaching. Particular attention is given to …

Rethinking Religious Minorities' Political Power, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

This Article challenges the assumption that small religious groups enjoy little political power. According to the standard view, courts, because of their countermajoritarian qualities, are indispensable for protecting religious minority groups from oppression by the majority. But this assumption fails to account for the many and varied ways in which the majoritarian branches have chosen to protect and accommodate even unpopular religious minority groups, as well as the courts’ failures to do so.

The Article offers a public choice analysis to account for the surprising majoritarian reality of religious accommodationism. Further, it explores the important implications of this reality for …

The Establishment Clause, State Action, And Town Of Greece, Nathan Chapman

Scholarly Works

The Establishment Clause forbids the government from engaging in the same religious exercise that the law protects when performed by a private party. Thus, an establishment case often turns on whether religious activity is "state action." Too often, however, courts ignore the state action analysis or merge it with the substantive Establishment Clause analysis. This muddles both doctrines and threatens individual religious liberty.

This Article argues that the state action doctrine should account for the government's distribution of private rights. Accordingly, the Constitution applies to the government's distribution of rights, but not to a private party's use of those rights. …

When Faith Falls Short: Bankruptcy Decisions Of Churches, Pamela Foohey

Scholarly Works

What does a church do when it is about to go bust? Religious organizations, like any business, can experience financial distress. Leaders could try to solve their churches’ financial problems on their own. Perhaps leaders do not view the problems as addressable with law. Or perhaps they do not think, as a moral or spiritual matter, that they should resort to the legal system, such as bankruptcy, to deal with their churches’ inability to pay its debts. Yet about ninety religious organizations seek to reorganize under the Bankruptcy Code every year. This Article relies on interviews with forty-five of these …

Sans Foi, Ni Loi. Appearances Of Conjugality And Lawless Love, Régine Tremblay

All Faculty Publications

This chapter deals with paradigm shifts in the legal regulation of adult intimate relationships. It includes the shifts from a unique conjugality to the multiplication of conjugalities, from marriage until death do us part to multiple subsequent unions, and from mimicking marriage by necessity to mimicking marriage by choice. Such changes open the floor for questions about the relevance of regulating adult intimate relationships today, or at the very least, about the compulsion to conceive of this kind of relationship as the cornerstone of Canadian family law. As such, it questions shifts in latent elements of the regulation of conjugality …

International Legal Experience And The Mormon Theology Of The State, 1945-2012, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Where's The Beef?, Stanley Fish

San Diego Law Review

A key concern of the papers written for this conference is the relationship between religious beliefs and secular beliefs of the kind that carry with them deep ethical obligations. Are these systems of belief essentially the same or are they different in important respects? The question is typically posed abstractly, and I thought it might be useful to have before us an example of religious belief and the demands that attend it. The example is taken from the beginning of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian, Bunyan’s protagonist, has suddenly become aware that his salvation is imperiled, and he is …

Religion And Insularity: Brian Leiter On Accommodating Religion, Christopher J. Eberle

San Diego Law Review

Crucial to Leiter’s overall case is the claim that there is no credible reason to accommodate religious objectors but not secular objectors: “[N]o one has been able to articulate a credible principled argument . . . that would explain why . . . we ought to accord special legal and moral treatment to religious practices.” He reaches this skeptical conclusion, in significant part, because he takes religion to be afflicted with a troubling defect, that is, religion involves commitment to categorical demands that are insulated from scientific and commonsensical scrutiny. But, I will argue, there is no good reason to …

Galston On Religion, Conscience, And The Case For Accommodation, Larry Alexander

San Diego Law Review

So these are some reasons why political theory might dictate that religious dissenters be accommodated even though, by enacting the laws to which the dissenters object, government indicates that it believes the dissenters err. If political theory justifies religious accommodations, however, then when government acts on the basis of political theory, is it establishing a religion? Bill argues, in support of Seeger, that claims of conscience derived from moral theory can qualify for accommodations under the Free Exercise Clause. But the two religion clauses in the Constitution use the noun “religion” only once. So if claims of conscience derived from …

Religion, Meaning, Truth, Life, Frederick Mark Gedicks

San Diego Law Review

I am a believer, yet I will also say that it is simply not correct that only religion can offer deep meaning to life, and I can say this out of my own experience. Ordinary activities can be crucial to the meaning of one’s life, whether or not they are experienced or defined as “religious.” Though not all such activities are as morally serious as religious belief and practice, some are, and they are surely not “nihilistic” or “nothing” because they lack the character of transcendent religious truth.

“Religion” As A Bundle Of Legal Proxies: Reply To Micah Schwartzman, Andrew Koppelman

San Diego Law Review

The debate among legal scholars about whether religion is special is chronically confused by the scholars’ failure to grasp a point familiar in the academic study of religion: “religion” is a label for something that has no ontological reality. Religion has no essence. If it has a determinate meaning, it is simply because there is a settled and familiar practice of applying the label of religion in predictable ways. The question of religious accommodation arises in cases where a law can allow some exceptions. Many laws, such as military conscription, taxes, environmental regulations, and antidiscrimination laws, will accomplish their ends …

Religion As A Legal Proxy, Micah Schwartzman

San Diego Law Review

In what follows, after briefly summarizing Koppelman’s position, I argue that his view is vulnerable to the charge that using religion as a legal proxy is unfair to those with comparable, but otherwise secular, ethical and moral convictions. Koppelman has, of course, anticipated this objection, but his responses are either ambivalent or insufficient to overcome it. The case for adopting religion as a proxy turns partly on arguments against other potential candidates. In particular, Koppelman rejects the freedom of conscience as a possible substitute. But even if he is right that its coverage is not fully extensive with the category …

How Much Autonomy Do You Want?, Maimon Schwarzschild

San Diego Law Review

At root, the questions of special accommodation and religious adjudicatory independence arise most urgently when a government grows in its reach and ambition. After all, if most areas of life, including those that touch on religious life, are left to people’s private arrangement, then not much special accommodation will be necessary. But when government takes control over more and more areas of life, regulating who shall do what and under what rules and conditions, then clashes with one or another religious way of life are almost inevitable. The dispute over government mandates to provide abortive drugs and contraception, in the …

Religion, Conscience, And The Case For Accommodation, William A. Galston

San Diego Law Review

I do not believe that religion is an obsolete constitutional category. But I do believe that the holdings in United States v. Seeger and Welsh v. United States, the Vietnam-era draft cases that extended conscientious objector status to individuals invoking nonreligious claims, were correct. Can I consistently embrace both propositions? I think I can. My argument, in brief, is that religion is indeed special. But when we understand what it is about religion that warrants both distinctive privileges and distinctive burdens, we will see that some other systems of belief track these features of religion closely enough to warrant comparable …

Why Distinguish Religion, Legally Speaking?, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

San Diego Law Review

Law professors commonly answer this critique by scholars of religion, as Andrew Koppelman does, with the comment that, after all, any ambiguity in definition only arises in a few cases. Most of the time the reference is obvious, he says. Moreover, he insists, it has worked fine for all those for whom it should work. But that is the problem—its very obviousness. The problems of exclusion are largely invisible. The reference is so obvious to many and so obviously inclusive of those who are deserving that there is no way to have a conversation about it without the conversation devolving …

Ties That Bind? The Questionable Consent Justification For Hosanna-Tabor, Jessie Hill

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Do All Roads Lead To Islamic Radicalism? A Comparison Of Islamic Laws In India And Nigeria, Amitabha Bose

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Can Religion Without God Lead To Religious Liberty Without Conflict?, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This Article engages with Ronald Dworkin’s final book, Religion Without God, which proposes to shrink the size and importance of the fierce “culture wars” in the United States between believers and nonbelievers – theists and atheists – by separating out the “science” and “value” components of religion to show these groups that they share a “fundamental religious impulse.” Religion Without God also calls for framing religious freedom as part of a general right to ethical independence rather than a “troublesome” special right for religious people. This article compares the argumentative strategy of Religion Without God with prior Dworkin works, such …

Press Definition And The Religion Analogy, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Faculty Scholarship

n a Harvard Law Review Forum response to Professor Sonja West's symposium article, "Press Exceptionalism," Professor RonNell Andersen Jones critiques Professor West's effort to define "the press" for purposes of Press Clause exceptions and addresses the weaknesses of Professor West's analogy to Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC in drawing these definitional lines. The response highlights distinctions between Press Clause and Religion Clause jurisprudence and urges a more functional approach to press definition.

Structural Models Of Religion And State In Jewish And Democratic Political Thought: Inevitable Contradiction? The Challenge For Israel, Elazar Nachalon

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court, Kings County, Wilson V. Kilkenny, James Dougherty

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bruce Ledewitz, American Religious Democracy: Coming To Terms With The End Of Secular Politics, Thomas A. Schweitzer

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

International Center For Law And Religion Studies, Cole Durham

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In 2010 Professor W. Cole Durham, Jr. received a grant in the amount of $20,000 to help offset the cost of mentoring and training selected law students following their first year of law school. These funds were received and accounted for by the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU (the “Center”) of which Professor Durham is the Director. This grant was to assist law students perform the following functions:

Once We Were Slaves, Now We Are Free: Legal, Administrative, And Social Issues Raised By Passover Celebrations In Prison, Aviva Orenstein

Pepperdine Law Review

“Once we were slaves, now we are free” is a central line from the Jewish Passover Seder, a ritual meal in which participants retell the story of liberation from Pharaoh’s oppression. In prison, many Jewish inmates request access to a Seder and to kosher-for-Passover food for the eight-day holiday. Prisoners’ requests to celebrate Passover provide a rich example for exploring the Religious Land Use and Institutional Persons Act (RLUIPA), and raise a host of tough questions regarding cost, safety, equal treatment of prisoners, and establishment of religion. Because kosher-for-Passover meals are more expensive and generally of higher quality than regular …

Brief For Bishopaccountability.Org Et Al. As Amici Curiae In Support Of Cert. Petition, John Doe B.P. V. Catholic Diocese Of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.