Religion Law Commons^™

A Larger Calling Still, Lee Hardy

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Can The Ordinary Practice Of Law Be A Religious Calling?, Robert F. Cochran Jr

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Impact On "The Vanishing Trial" If People Of Faith Were Faithful To Religious Principles Of Settling Disputes Without Litigation , Anthony R. Benedetto

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

Commentators have expressed concern about "the vanishing trial" with respect to the possible loss of precedent and the loss of opportunities for aggrieved persons to have their concerns resolved in the judicial arena. Ignoring the controversy surrounding whether the number of trials is actually decreasing significantly, this paper asks whether the number of trials would be significantly affected if all people of faith resolved their disputes within their religious communities, or at least outside of the secular court setting. The impact on secular case law of the disappearance of such disputes is then estimated. Finally, recommendations are presented for overcoming …

Dual Lenses: Using Theology And International Human Rights To Assess China's 2005 Regulations On Religion, Joel A. Nichols

Pepperdine Law Review

In order for China to move forward in the international community, it needs to continue to improve its standing on human rights issues. Of particular concern to many observers is the relationship between the government and religion. While foreign religious organizations and missionaries are still heavily regulated by a 1994 law, a new law respecting religious citizens and organizations within China went into effect in 2005. This new law is salutary in some respects in that it provides a much fuller delineation of the relationship between government and religion within China, and it appears more solicitous toward religious rights than …

Levinson Is To Mr. Justice "Isaiah" As St. Paul Was To The Prophet Isaiah, Richard H. Weisberg

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Brief For Prof. Leslie C. Griffin As Amica Curiae In Support Of Neither Party, Cannata V. Catholic Diocese Of Austin, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Brief For Prof. Leslie C. Griffin As Amica Curiae In Support Of Appellant, Scott V. Pierce, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Brief For Prof. Leslie C. Griffin Et Al. As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church And School V. E.E.O.C., Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Civil Marriage: Threat To Democracy, Jessica Knouse

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article argues that civil marriage and democracy are inherently incompatible, whether assessed from a transcultural perspective that reduces them to their most universal aspects or a culturally situated perspective that accounts for their uniquely American elaborations. Across virtually all cultures, civil marriage privileges sexual partners by offering them exclusive access to highly desirable government benefits, while democracy presupposes liberty and equality. When governments privilege sexual partners, they effectively deprive their citizens of liberty by encouraging them to enter sexual partnerships rather than selfdetermining based on their own preferences; they effectively deprive their citizens of equality by establishing insidious status …

Rights, Reservations, And Religion; International Human Rights Law And The Status Of Women, Mark Goldfeder

Scholarly Works

While human rights law in its current form is less than fifty years old, the issues that it grapples with are much, much older. People oftentimes dismiss religion or religious norms as being out of date, close-minded, or old-fashioned, and label religious views as discriminatory in theory or even in practice. In reality, religions have been dealing with human rights issues since ancient times, and in some ways have laid the groundwork for the very modern discussions that have supplanted them. The answers that religions give, therefore, deserve at the very least a careful and respectful analysis before they are …

A Look At The Establishment Clause Through The Prism Of Religious Perspectives: Religious Majorities, Religious Minorities, And Nonbelievers, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

This article traces the Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence through several decades, examining a number of landmark cases through the prism of religious minority perspectives. In so doing, the Article aims to demonstrate the significance of religious perspectives in the development of both the doctrine and rhetoric of the Establishment Clause. The Article then turns to the current state of the Establishment Clause, expanding upon these themes through a close look at the 2004 and 2005 cases Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, Van Orden v. Perry, and McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. The article concludes …

Religion, School, And Judicial Decision Making: An Empirical Perspective, Michael Heise, Gregory C. Sisk

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We analyze various influences on judicial outcomes favoring religion in cases involving elementary and secondary schools and decided by lower federal courts. A focus on religion in the school context is warranted as the most difficult and penetrating questions about the proper relationship between Church and State have arisen with special frequency, controversy, and fervor in the often-charged atmosphere of education. Schools and the Religion Clauses collide persistently, and litigation frames many of these collisions. Also, the frequency and magnitude of these legal collisions increase as various policy initiatives increasingly seek to leverage private and religious schools in the service …

The Constitutional Right Not To Kill, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

Federal and state governments participate in and/or permit a variety of different types of killings. These include military operations, capital punishment, assisted suicide, abortion and self-defense or defense of others. In a pluralistic society, it is no surprise that there will be some members of the population who refuse to participate in some or all of these types of killings. The question of how governments should treat such refusals is older than the Republic itself. Since colonial times, the answer to this question has been driven largely by statutory protections, with the Constitution playing a smaller role, particularly since the …

Limiting Principles And Empowering Practices In American Indian Religious Freedoms, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

Employment Division v. Smith was a watershed moment in First Amendment law, with the Supreme Court holding that neutral statutes of general applicability could not burden the free exercise of religion. Congress's subsequent attempts, including the passage of Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, to revive legal protections for religious practice through the legislative and administrative process have received tremendous attention from legal scholars. Lost in this conversation, however, have been the American Indians at the center of the Smith case. Indeed, for them, the decision criminalizing the possession of their peyote sacrament was …

Sandel On Religion In The Public Square, Hugh Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

In the final chapter of "Justice" (2009), Sandel calls for a “new politics of the common good,” which he presents as an alternative to John Rawls’s idea of public reason. Sandel calls “misguided” Rawls’s search for “principles of justice that are neutral among competing conceptions of the good life.” According to Sandel, “[i]t is not always possible to define our rights and duties without taking up substantive moral questions; and even when it’s possible it may not be desirable.” In taking up these moral questions, Sandel writes, we must allow specifically religious convictions and reasons into the sphere of public …

When The Child Abuser Has A Bible: Investigating Child Maltreatment Sanctioned Or Condoned By A Religious Leader, Basyle Tchividjian, Victor Vieth

Faculty Publications and Presentations

In many cases of child sexual and physical abuse, perpetrators use religious or spiritual themes to justify their abuse of a child. Although no known religion in modern culture suggests that sexual abuse is condoned or taught as part of its tenets, some church leaders engage in conduct suggesting the child is equally, if not more to blame than the perpetrator, while also urging immediate reconciliation between the perpetrator and victim. In more than one case, pastors have asked children to confess their own “sins” in being sexually abused and have even required children to “confess” in front of an …

Tango Or More - From California's Lesson 9 To The Constitutionality Of A Gay-Friendly Curriculum In Public Elementary Schools, Amy Lai

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In August 2009, a group of parents in California filed a lawsuit, Balde v. Alameda Unified School District, in the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda. They alleged that the Alameda Unified School District refused them the right to excuse their children from a new curriculum, Lesson 9, that would teach public elementary school children about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) families. The proposed curriculum included short sessions about GLBT people, incorporated into more general lessons about family and health, once a year from kindergarten through fifth grade. Kindergarteners would learn the harms of teasing, while fifth graders …

Phony Originalism And The Establishment Clause, Andrew M. Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

The "originalist" interpretations of the Establishment Clause by Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas are remarkably indifferent to the original purposes of that clause. Their arguments are a remarkable congeries of historical error and outright misrepresentation. This is not necessarily a criticism of originalism per se. However, the abuse of originalist scholarship that these judges have practiced raises questions about what originalist scholars are actually accomplishing.

Salazar V. Buono: A Missed Opportunity To Clarify The Reasonable Observer Test, Sumahn Das

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Education As A Counterterrorism Tool And The Curious Case Of The Texas School Book Resolution, Diane Webber

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Right Not To Participate In Abortions: Roe, Casey, And The Fourteenth Amendment Rights Of Healthcare Providers, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

The Fourteenth Amendment rights of various parties in the abortion context – the pregnant woman, the fetus, the fetus’ father, the state – have been discussed at length by commentators and the courts. Surprisingly, the Fourteenth Amendment rights of the healthcare provider asked to provide the abortion have not. Roe and Casey establish a pregnant woman’s Fourteenth Amendment right to decide for herself whether to have an abortion. Do those same precedents also protect her doctor’s right to decide whether to participate in abortion procedures?

The Court’s substantive due process analysis typically looks for rights that are “deeply rooted” in …

Noah's Curse: How Religion Often Conflates Status, Belief, And Conduct To Resist Antidiscrimination Norms, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Georgia Law Review

Today, many devout Christian fundamentalists support
some state discrimination against gay people, on the
ground that full equality for gays would mean fewer
liberties for themselves. In its recent controversy with a
public law school, the Christian Legal Society argued that
it was entitled to state subsidies even though it violated
the school's antidiscrimination policy. The Society said it
excluded only "unrepentant homosexuals"-those gay
persons whose "immoral" conduct and degraded status
were directly linked to what the Society considered an
anti-Christian message.
Professor Eskridge demonstrates that the same clash
between equality for minorities and liberty for Christian
fundamentalists played out …

Religion, Human Rights, And Post-Secular Legal Theory, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

This paper proposes that the fundamental challenge for religious legal theory is the question of the secular and, in particular, a certain mode of secular reason that has shaped the idea of law within modernity. The fundamental ambition of modern legal thought was to sever law from a connection to a sacred cosmic and intellectual order. The idea of human rights, at least in its regnant expression, embodies this project most fully in that it has increasingly been defined as a moral tradition that stands over and against religion. This paper, by contrast, argues that the destabilization of secular meaning …

State Power, Religion, And Women's Rights: A Comparative Analysis Of Family Law, Mala Htun, S. Laurel Weldon

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Examining cross-national variation in family law, we find that many countries have reformed to promote sex equality. Yet a significant group retains older laws that discriminate against women. These variations reflect the diverse institutional legacies of these societies, conforming closely-but not entirely-to inherited legal traditions: civil law, common law, and postsocialist countries are the most egalitarian, while countries applying religious law are the least. Yet change is possible, even in unlikely contexts. Political conjunctures that disarm religious, nationalist, and fundamentalist opponents can open windows of opportunity for liberalizing reform.

Human Rights and Legal Systems Across the Global South, Symposium, Indiana …

Ancient Laws, Yet Strangely Modern: Biblical Contract And Tort Jurisprudence, Richard H. Hiers

UF Law Faculty Publications

People generally, and even most biblical scholars, tend to view biblical law as, at best, a random patchwork of odd and antiquated commandments and rules. The present Article demonstrates that many biblical laws can be understood to have functioned in biblical time, in ways remarkably similar to various laws characterized in modern Anglo-American jurisprudence as contract and tort law. In particular, the Article points out that the biblical tort laws found in Exodus 21:18 through 22:17 are structured along lines closely parallel to concepts found in modern tort law jurisprudence. Many of the biblical laws considered here give expression to …

Religious Legal Theory Symposium: Introduction, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

On November 5, 2010, the St. John's Center for Law and Religion proudly hosted the annual Religious Legal Theory Conference. The event, now in its second year and to be shared among different universities, brought together scholars from around the world to discuss this year's theme, "Religion in Law, Law in Religion." The Center chose this theme in order to include papers on traditional church-state issues—“Religion in Law"—as well as papers addressing the role that law plays in various religious traditions—“Law in Religion." In addition, because contemporary law and religion scholarship has moved beyond strictly domestic-law questions, and takes an …

Religion And Bankruptcy, Keith Sharfman, G. Ray Warner

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

From the time of its creation and throughout its evolution, bankruptcy law has affected and been affected by religion. Important aspects of current bankruptcy law, such as the discharge of debt and the exemption of personal property, originated in religious traditions before making their way into secular law. At the same time, religious individuals and institutions are themselves often parties in bankruptcy cases, and the Bankruptcy Code specifically protects religious contributions from avoidance as fraudulent transfers, excludes them from consideration in connection with the dismissal of a bankruptcy case for reasons of abuse, and allows them as a deductible …

The Political (And Other) Safeguards Of Religious Freedom, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

This essay is a contribution to a symposium marking the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s still-controversial decision in Employment Division v. Smith. That decision, it is suggested, should not be read as reflecting or requiring hostility or indifference towards claims for legislatively enacted accommodations of religion. Smith is not an endorsement of religion-blind neutrality in constitutional law; instead, it assigns to politically accountable actors the difficult, but crucially important, task of accommodating those whose religious exercise would otherwise be burdened by generally applicable laws. The essay goes on to suggest several things that must be true of our law …

I'M A Laycockian! (For The Most Part), Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

You know you’ve made it, scholarly-wise speaking, when a major publishing house and a preeminent university approach you to ask whether they could publish a four-volume set of your collected works. Such is the situation of Douglas Laycock (DL), long-time Professor at the University of Texas School of Law, now moving from the University of Michigan to the University of Virginia and most certainly on just about everyone’s short list of greatest church–state scholars of the past quarter-century. Volume One of the collection was published in 2010; it is subtitled “Overviews & History” and contains roughly forty pieces written by …

Judges And Religious-Based Reasoning, David Blaikie, Diana Ginn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Is it ever acceptable for a judge in a secular liberal democracy to rely on, and explicitly refer to, religious-based reasoning in reaching a decision? While it is unlikely that many Canadian judges will be seized with the desire to include religious-based reasoning in their judgments, we raise this issue because it allows us to examine the appropriate role of religious-based discourse in a challenging context, where arguments about unconstitutionality are strongest. In a previous article, we concluded that there are no ethical impediments to citizens using such discourse in discussing public affairs. We argued that it is no less …