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…
Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “The Supreme Court Expands the Rights of Prisoners Facing Execution” Peter Wosnik Religious liberty claims in death penalty cases have been an active area of litigation in the Supreme Court over the last several years. In a recent line of cases, the Supreme Court has clarified both a…
Picture by Petr Ovralov 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. On June 24th, the Supreme Court reversed the nearly 50-year-old legal precedent protecting the right to safe abortions in…
Picture by Dave Adamson 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. This essay was originally published in First Things before the Supreme Court decided Kennedy v. Bremerton. Though all eyes…
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…
Chambers of the US Supreme Court by Carol M. Highsmith. On March 24, for the third time in two years, the Supreme Court sided with a religious inmate on death row who wished to have his spiritual advisor in the room at the time he would be put to death. In the prior cases, the…
Picture by Boris Stromar on Pixabay. In fall 2017, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado. The key question was whether a Christian baker’s First Amendment free speech or religious free exercise rights permitted him to refuse to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple in violation of Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination…
Image: “Obergefell v. Hodges Decision Announced — June 26, 2015” by Matt Popovich. The conflict between gay rights and religious liberty is back (if it can be said to have left), this time in 303 Creative v. Elenis, a Supreme Court case which arrives under the guise of free speech. The religious claimant will almost…
“Candlelight” from Pixabay (License) Prayer is everywhere. Everyone is disputing prayer, even though the First Amendment states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Or maybe the problem lies in the wording of the amendment itself. Establishment or free exercise? The Supreme Court has set numerous…
Picture of the US Supreme Court by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash. The newest edition of Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment is supplemented by a powerful new research tool: SCOTUSreligioncases.org. Building a free online database of First Amendment religion cases I first encountered Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment in 2006. Then in its second…