1896. The year seemed to flash in glaring red lights from the text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision as I was preparing my next lecture for “Law, Religion, and Social Change,” a course that I was teaching at Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 2005. The course was intended to…
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1921) “By nonetheless granting relief, the Court goes astray. . . . That renders the Court’s emergency docket not for emergencies at all.”Justice Elena Kagan, Louisiana v. American Rivers (2022) Hitler’s Lawyer About a decade ago, the name of a particular twentieth-century political theorist…
On December 1, 2021, the United States Supreme Court will hear the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that threatens to be the death knell for abortion rights, reproductive freedom, and the right of women to bodily autonomy and security in the U.S. In Dobbs, Mississippi’s last remaining abortion clinic is…
Over the last three decades of work in the fields of law, religion, and human rights, I have been privileged to work with fellow scholars with a range of views on what is known in the United States as “religious freedom.” In my work with scholars outside the U.S., I have also been schooled in…
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. Recently, in my part of the world, as in many places across the United States, debates have raged over the enforcement of mask mandates as a measure against…
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. Following the murder of eight people in Atlanta, six of them Asian-American women, news broke that the killer Robert Aaron Long had been expelled from his church. At…
No one has heard a peep from this chorister in nearly a year. Trained in law, religion, and the law of religious freedom, there was a time early in the pandemic when I wondered whether the social distancing mandates being adopted by state and, in some cases, municipal governments would be experienced by some as…
This article is part of our “Notorious ACB: Law, Religion, and Justice Barrett’s Ascent to the Court” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The No Religious Test Clause within Article VI, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution is a special text in the field of law and religion,…
Congressman Clay Higgins, representing Louisiana’s Third Congressional District, recently drew attention for his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, the congressman addressed a letter to Louisiana’s Governor John Bel Edwards decrying and denouncing restrictions on group gatherings as a violation of freedoms of religion and assembly under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Then,…
Cover Image: U.S. Congressman Mike Pompeo in 2011. Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0 On May 30, 2019, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards—the only Democratic governor of a deep-south state—signed into law a “heartbeat bill” banning abortion after six weeks. In defending his decision, which contravenes the national Democratic Party’s platform plank on securing reproductive health and…