The Reservation Tribal Office at Lake Superior via the National Park Service. From the earliest Supreme Court rulings to the annual presidential proclamations that mark National Native American Heritage Month, the United States has treated Native sovereignty as both a legal and moral question, one rooted as much in theology as in jurisprudence. The very…
Picture by Todd van Hoosear (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED). In June 2023, the Supreme Court announced two significant First Amendment decisions: 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis and Groff v. DeJoy. In 303 Creative, both the majority and the dissent commented on what a difference time can make. But in both 303 Creative and Groff, I…
Picture by Adam Kring on Unsplash. “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…
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. In its Carson v. Makin decision, the Supreme Court held that the State of Maine violated the Free Exercise rights of parents who wished…
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. 2021-2022 was a blockbuster Supreme Court term for opponents of church-state separation. In the course of a few short months, the Court stripped women of…
Natural Rights and the First Amendment Religion ClausesVincent Phillip Muñoz The following is a modified excerpt from Vincent Phillip Muñoz’s 2022 book Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses, available now from University of Chicago Press. It is now no more that toleration is…
Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. 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. For the past 60 years, American education has been governed by…
Picture by Moren Hsu 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. In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that when a state funds private school education it must…
Picture by Wokandapix on Pixabay. 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. Notwithstanding the fears of the Supreme Court’s critics, who suggest that it intends to eliminate public education by providing…
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…