Religion Law Commons^™

Restricting Data Flows Is A Sign Of Weakness, Nikolas Guggenberger

Seattle University Law Review

There has been a seismic shift in American attitudes toward the free flow of data across borders.  In less than a decade, the United States has transitioned from condemning barriers to digital trade to constructing a digital fortress of its own. It passed legislation requiring TikTok’s parent company to divest its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban affecting 170 million U.S. users, citing national security concerns about its ties to China and the potential for data surveillance and content manipulation. Upon legal challenge by TikTok on First Amendment grounds, the Supreme Court affirmed the ban’s constitutionality. Recent federal legislation …

Product Nationality And Corporate Identity, Trang (Mae) Nguyen

Seattle University Law Review

Global supply chains have long depended on a deceptively technical device: the attribution of a “nationality” to goods. A trade law principle, rules of origin assign products an “economic passport” that governs how they are treated at the border, including what markets they may enter and which tariff rates apply. In recent years, however, product nationality has taken on a new and far more ambitious role. As U.S. trade policy increasingly intersects with national security and human rights policy, policymakers rely on nationality-based measures to police supply chain linkages, curb geopolitical issues, and discipline firms for their links to forced …

Global Supply Chain Resilience In Emerging Technologies: A Case Study Of Bitcoin Mining, Kishanthi Parella, Carla L. Reyes

Seattle University Law Review

The United States has put into motion bold plans in critical and emerging technologies to bolster its national and economic security.  For example, the federal government created a national bitcoin strategic reserve and a stockpile of other cryptocurrency; while several states have committed to or are considering similar goals.  However, the security of these reserves is dependent on two types of supply chains within the Bitcoin mining industry: analogue supply chains, relating to the physical components needed for Bitcoin mining, and data supply chains, relating to the complex and layered logistical network of actors that create input into the software …

Third-Party Funding: Balancing Transparency, National Security, And Access To Justice, Victoria Shannon Sahani

Seattle University Law Review

Many lawmakers who have recently become aware of the multi-billion-dollar global third-party funding industry are raising new national security concerns that further complicate preexisting, longstanding debates about transparency, disclosure, access to justice, and the best way to regulate third-party funding. In response, this Article briefly asserts three main points relating to the question of how best to regulate third-party funding. First, this Article explains the third-party funding industry, including its global regulatory landscape and how it serves three distinct populations: consumers, businesses, and law firms. Second, this Article explains that third-party funding is one tool that can help expand access …

The Field Of International Business Transactions Law, Kathleen Claussen

Seattle University Law Review

This Article studies the evolution of the scholarly subfield referred to as the law of “international business transactions” (IBT). It reviews data on academic articles, courses, textbooks and other signifiers of the growth of this research area. Beginning around 1960, scholars began to use the term “international business transactions” and by the 1980s, several law schools were offering a course by that title. A handful of dedicated textbooks soon followed. These data reflect a gradual increase in research on the topic of IBT, particularly in the United States, but also considerable diversity of subject matters covered by those works. The …

Kim Gyeong-Seok And The Origins Of Northeast Asia’S Corporate Accountability Movement For War And Colonialism, Timothy Webster

Seattle University Law Review

For the past three decades, a transnational reparations movement has unfolded across Northeast Asia. Hundreds of victims—assisted by attorneys, academics, and activists—seek remedies from Japan for various atrocities committed during World War II, colonialism, and other historical injustices.  They press their claims in street protests, legislative hearings, dramatic performances, and other fora.  The “comfort women” are the best known of these claimants; their global redress campaign ex-tends from noisy protests outside of Japan’s embassy in Seoul, to mute statues in raucous boroughs of Berlin.  More obscure, though larger in number, were the roughly one million Koreans who performed forced labor …

Navigating Compliance In A Geopolitical Era: The Case Of Chinese Multinationals In The United States, Ji Li

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines how Chinese multinational companies (MNCs) approach compliance in the United States amid deepening geo-political rivalry and intensified regulatory scrutiny. Drawing on original survey data, this Article maps variations in compliance structures, staffing, and governance mechanisms across Chinese firms and identifies key determinants such as industry-specific regulatory intensity, listing status, and organizational imprinting from headquarters. The analysis employs a dual institutional framework to explain how compliance systems emerge from the interplay between host-state regulatory demands and home-state institutional legacies, producing hybrid structures that blend local adaptation with headquarters-driven replication. Findings reveal that while certain compliance features—such as committee …

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Approaches To Shaping International Outer Space Law And Norms, Ariel G. Silverman

Seattle University Law Review

This article explores convergences and divergencies in the United States and PRC’s responses to the stalemate in the United Nations over the future of outer space resource governance. I do so by systematically analyzing these leading space-faring nations’ policy-positions and tactics deployed to shape norms around three substantive areas of outer space resource governance: rights of ownership and scope of utilization of space resources, mechanization of the “benefits sharing” principle, and the rights and responsibilities of the private sector. I theorize that these leading space-faring nations have adopted divergent approaches due to their differing historical relationships with international law and …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Establishment That Time Forgot: The Historical Understanding Of Religious Offenses And Their Unconstitutionality In Modern Law, Benjamin J. Citow

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note argues that religious offenses, meaning laws which penalize conduct for religious purposes, should be barred by the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, as the Clause was interpreted in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. This is because Kennedy interpreted the Establishment Clause to prohibit each of the several types of laws which early Americans associated with religious establishment—the historical practice wherein early states would adopt a religion as the state religion and pass various types of laws for its support. And religious offenses, this Note argues, were amongst the types of laws which early Americans so associated with …

Papal Jurisprudence, Chad Marzen, William Woodyard

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

A Clash Between Rfra And The Department Of Homeland Security: Does A Rescission Of The Sensitive Locations Policy Substantially Burden The Free Exercise Of Religion?, Mathew Pelham

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

The Union Gospel Mission Cases, Church Autonomy, And Co-Religionist Hiring: A Response To Professor Esbeck, Robert W. Tuttle, Peter J. Smith

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Courts have increasingly applied a doctrine of church autonomy to resolve claims involving religious organizations. A recent decision of the Ninth Circuit invoked the doctrine to permit religious employers to favor co-religionists in hiring, even for non-ministerial positions. Professor Carl Esbeck has written a thoughtful critique of the court’s decision. This essay responds to Esbeck and, more broadly, provides a criticism of church autonomy doctrine and a roadmap for decision when the Ninth Circuit’s opinion is reviewed en banc. In our view, courts should apply a doctrine of ecclesiastical abstention, which prevents them from resolving specifically religious questions. But we …

Ten Commandments Cases: Learning From Reformation Coercion, Paul E. Mcgreal

Michigan Law Review Online

The Supreme Court’s recent embrace of “historical practices and understandings” in interpreting the Establishment Clause has emboldened states to challenge forty-five years of precedent prohibiting Ten Commandments displays in public schools. Yet, these states advance a version of history that mistakenly ignores European religious persecution that shaped how the Founders understood the establishment of religion. This Essay remedies that error through a novel historical analogy: sixteenth-century Catholic processions that forced Protestants to choose between betraying their conscience or marking themselves for persecution. Like modern students confronting state-mandated religious texts, Reformation-era dissenters faced orchestrated tests of faith designed to identify and …

Memoir: The Brain, Neuroethics, And Bioethics, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

This Essay examines how developments in neuroscience (or brain science) affect our views of law, medicine, ethics, and religion. Part I shows how lack of clarity about brain death can lead to premature organ donation. Part II argues that health care too often provides inadequate brain care and incomplete rehabilitation. Part III explains why recovery may be possible for those braininjured patients who are told it is not. Part IV demonstrates how the fear of a brain-injured patient oddly affects my perspective on Tort and Criminal Law, which are being influenced by neuroscientific advances. Part V examines the new developments …

Religious Freedom, Jesuit Mission, And Dei, William M. Treanor, Amelia J. Uelmen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The ability of Jesuit educational institutions to pursue a central part of their mission – that of fostering diverse, equitable and inclusive educational environments – is under attack. This essay outlines several dimensions of their religiously-grounded mission and the reasons to strongly protect from government interference the rights of Jesuit universities to implement programs and practices that align with DEI values. First, for Jesuit universities, these programs and practices are rooted in a much deeper culture of the more than 2,000-year old Catholic intellectual tradition and the now 500-year old tradition of Jesuit spirituality. Second, drawing on the classic work …

The Ten Commandments, Stripped Of Slavery, Exodus & Jubilee, Christopher D. Hampson

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Ten Commandments are back on public classroom walls and in federal court, after several states passed new laws requiring school districts to post the text. As attorneys, judges, and amici debate whether First Amendment law has changed enough since Stone v. Graham in 1980 to allow the posting of the ancient religious text, this Essay comes at the situation from an entirely different angle. The precise text proposed by the states might be a good example of “ceremonial deism,” but it removes biblical law from biblical narrative – and, in doing so, unsets the Ten Commandments from their original …

Effects Of Expropriation Of Private Real Estate For Public Benefit In Saudi Law And Islamic Law, Hayat Mohammadali Hassan Nimir

Theses and Dissertations

The expropriation of private real estate for public benefit represents one of the most sensitive and complex legal issues, as it directly intersects with the protection of individual ownership rights while simultaneously addressing the demands of public interest and state development. This research provides a comprehensive analytical study of the legal framework governing expropriation in Saudi Arabia, examining both historical and contemporary legislation, while assessing its consistency with the objectives of Islamic Sharia, which grants strong protection to ownership rights but allows their restriction under strict conditions to serve genuine public needs.

The dissertation explores the theoretical foundations of property …

Sacred Or Sham? Strengthening Judicial Review Of Religious Sincerity Under The Free Exercise Clause Article Title, Montana Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

While the Court has expanded the scope of Free Exercise protections, it has conspicuously failed to articulate how courts should separate sincere religious claims from fraudulent ones. The result is a doctrinal void: any claimant can recast political or philosophical objections as "religious" and demand constitutional protection. The risk is that the Free Exercise Clause, if stripped of any sincerity filter, will collapse into a generalized right to exemption from law. This Article argues that courts can assess religious sincerity without evaluating the truth or validity of the religious belief, and it proposes a framework grounded in the constitutional text, …