In 1925, on Day 7 of the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” (The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes), defense attorney Clarence Darrow interrogated prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand. His purpose was to discredit Bryan’s (and many Protestants’) view that the original author of Genesis understood the six days of creation…
Picture by Ted Eytan (CC BY-SA 2.0) This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Kennedy v. Bremerton was heard by the Supreme Court in 2022. But the case truly began in…
Picture by Claire Anderson on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. I was unhappy, but not surprised, to see Canopy Forum including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case…
Picture by Patrick Fore on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The Supreme Court’s Term in 1991-1992 promised to be highly consequential. Two hot-button issues were on the Court’s docket…
US Supreme Court by John L. Marino. This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The Supreme Court has long recognized the individual human conscience as sacred territory. One of the most famous…
Picture by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash. This essay is based on the author’s 2021 Minnesota Law Review article “The Nineteenth Amendment as a Generative Tool for Defeating LGBT Religious Exemptions.” Since the U.S. Supreme Court held that marriage equality is the law of the land in 2015, American society has been embroiled in a cultural…
Photo by Brad Dodson on Unsplash. One of the most contentious issues in constitutional law is whether governmental action amounts to “an establishment of religion” in violation of the First Amendment. For the past fifty years, the Court has often, but not always, resolved Establishment Clause cases using the three-pronged test established by Lemon v. Kurtzman. Under the…
Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash. This is Part II of Laura Ford’s essay on Social Identity Pietism and the First Amendment Balance. The First Amendment Balance & Social Peace In a careful historical study of American cultural and jurisprudential developments relating to First Amendment religious freedom, Philip Hamburger has persuasively argued that the U.S.…
Photo by Darya Tryfanava on Unsplash. This is the final remnant of the Christianity of their ancestors, the last enduring bit of their inheritance: a social gospel, without the gospel. – Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age (2014) The law commands and requires us to do certain things. The law is thus directed to our behavior and…
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Law and Religion Under Pressure: A One-Year Pandemic Retrospective” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Constitutional theory and theology often intersect within a society. Theology may inform and influence constitutional assumptions and constitutional theory may shape some…