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…
Religion and the American Constitutional Experimentby John Witte, Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett Thomas Jefferson once described America’s new religious freedom guarantees as a “fair” and “novel experiment.” These guarantees, set out in the new state and federal constitutions of 1776 to 1791, defied the millennium-old assumptions inherited from Western Europe that…
Photo by Victor Moussa on adobe.stock.com. The contemporary debate around the right to free exercise of religion — and its limits — focuses overwhelmingly on conservative Christian beliefs about sex, gender, marriage, and reproduction. This is understandable given the vast resources and focus that the Christian right has placed on gaining religious exemptions from laws…
US Supreme Court Building by Mark Thomas on Pixabay. This article first appeared in the Forward, the nation’s leading Jewish news organization. Sign up here to get the Forward’s newsletters in your inbox. President Biden has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill Justice Breyer’s seat on the Supreme Court. The nomination is no doubt…
Photo of Manhattan by wiggijo on Pixabay (CC0) A virtual conference sponsored by Canopy Forum of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory (CSLR) featuring scholars, experts and practitioners on the topic of religious arbitration. View the full video and browse all essays here. “Two Conceptions of Anti-Establishment: When Should Courts Enforce…
Photo of Manhattan by wiggijo on Pixabay (CC0) A virtual conference sponsored by Canopy Forum of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory (CSLR) featuring scholars, experts and practitioners on the topic of religious arbitration. View the full video and browse all essays here. “There is no First Amendment Exemption in Contracts…
Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash. Holidays are not the same for everyone, not even in prison. No matter what the constitutional principle of equality says, holidays are not the same for everyone. For the wealthy, holidays present an opportunity to travel and relax with their loved ones. On the other hand, for those who…
Photo of the Village Church of Lincolnshire by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash. For several decades, parties asserting religious liberty claims under the Free Exercise Clause saw little success at the Supreme Court. Over the past few years, however, religious groups have fared better. Recently, they prevailed in cases challenging various restrictions imposed on houses of…
Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “Ramirez v. Collier: Will the Supreme Court Expand the Right to the Presence of a Spiritual Advisor for Prisoners During Execution?” Peter Wosnik In September 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a rare, eleventh-hour stay in an execution case for prisoner John Ramirez. Ramirez was convicted of stabbing…
Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash. 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,…