Religion

About three weeks ago, in a per curiam (that is, unsigned) opinion in a case that was not fully briefed and argued at the Supreme Court, a majority of Justices (Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett) announced a potentially game-changing approach to processing claims brought under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Since 1990, and the decision in Employment Division v.

The meaning of the religion clauses in judicial opinions has changed dramatically over the past 150 years. Doctrine has shifted, sometimes precipitously. The case law has been convoluted and unpredictable. The Free Exercise Clause, for example, was initially interpreted to protect religious belief, but not religious practice.  Many decades later, the U.S.

King Hall faculty continue to make many media appearances and write opinion articles following the election of Donald Trump as President. Hot topics range from immigration and the environment to human rights and treason.

Here are recent op-eds by two of our Constitutional Law faculty.

"Congressional Caution Is Needed" by Alan Brownstein in U.S. News & World Report

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Zubik v. Burwell on March 23, 2016, six years to the day the Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law. The petitioners, a group of religious organizations, have challenged the ACA's contraceptive coverage requirement.

14 people are dead. 21 are injured.

A young couple armed for battle attacked a Christmas party full of the husband's colleagues. In the face of this nightmare -- both the 355th mass shooting in 336 days in the United States, and one that came less than three weeks after the Paris attacks -- right and left alike are sticking to their scripts rather than grappling with the complex reality. If we are to successfully prevent future massacres, that has to change.

First and foremost, we have to think of the victims and their families.

A political cartoon from 1882, showing a Chinese man being barred entry to the "Golden Gate of Liberty". The caption reads, "We must draw the line somewhere, you know."  Courtesy of Wikipedia

On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down two cases, Elonis v. United States and EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch, that had received a lot of press in earlier stages of the litigations and that, judging from the briefs, posed important civil rights issues concerning freedom of speech and freedom of religion, respectively.

As we noted in a column for this site two weeks ago, state religious freedom restoration acts, or RFRAs, such as the recently amended Indiana religious liberty statute, have been criticized on the ground that they are intended to permit discrimination against gays, lesbians, and same-sex couples in the provision of goods and services.

In my last column, Part I of this Two-Part series, I argued that lower courts are justified in paying (indeed perhaps required to pay) close attention to Justice Kennedy's concurring opinion in this summer's blockbuster Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling, even though the "Opinion of the Court" in that case had the support of five Justices.

Legal and political commentators have already spent thousands of hours on how best to understand Justice Alito's majority opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and whether Justice Ginsburg's dissent was accurate in saying the decision was of "startling breadth."