Photo by little plant 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. I The COVID-19 pandemic recently passed the one-year mark. Despite the predictions of some health officials a year ago, the once-impossible has…
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out 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. In Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020), the U.S. Supreme Court held that New York’s religious-attendance restrictions “would lead to irreparable…
Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “The Right to Shun: Ghent’s Misguided Jehovah’s Witness Decision” Matthew P. Cavedon In March, the criminal court of Ghent, Belgium fined the congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) for “inciting discrimination and hatred or violence against former members.” The case centered on the JW practice of “disfellowshipping.” While the…
Photo by Silvestri Matteo 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. Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that it was last term, rather than this term, when the U.S. Supreme Court…
Photo by Eduardo Rodriguez 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. Europe has been an epicenter of the pandemic. It has drawn a lot of attention due to how rapidly and deeply it…
Image by Romy from Pixabay. 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. “Even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.” — Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, 141 S. Ct.…
Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash. Do Muslims pray even when they are not required to by “shari’a”? Or is being a Muslim a matter of performing exclusively compulsory religious acts, punctually and “to a T,” lest one get punished by the dreaded, bearded, and scowling “shari’a”? For reasons that we need not review here,…
Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “Denmark’s Provincial Bias against Foreign Religious Languages“ Matthew P. Cavedon Denmark has proposed a new law regulating religion. Under it, all sermons and homilies must be translated into Danish. This is being billed as a national security measure. It is also being attacked as a burden on small…
An EU Law on Religion – A Recent DevelopmentEmma Ahlm The following post is a reworking of the conclusions drawn in Emma Ahlm’s dissertation, EU Law and Religion – A Study of How the Court of Justice has Adjudicated on Religious Matters in EU Law at Uppsala University. ‘Would you tell me, please, which way…
Photo by David Beale on Unsplash. 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…