I’m here in lovely and warm San Diego (Mark went east and I went west) attending this conference organized by Larry Alexander and Steve Smith’s impressive Institute for Law and Religion at the University of San Diego Law School. Here is the conference description:

Hosanna-Tabor and/or Employment Division v. Smith?

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School v. EEOC raised crucial questions. Was the decision reconcilable with the doctrine articulated in Employment Division v. Smith? If so, how? Did Hosanna-Tabor represent a passing anomaly or a major new direction in the constitutional jurisprudence of religious freedom? Such questions are still very much with us, and they can be addressed both normatively and descriptively and from a variety of standpoints: conventional legal analysis, history, political science, or political theory. This conference will consider such questions and their significance for the future of religious freedom in this country.

And here’s the abstract for my paper, Free Exercise by Moonlight (more on it by and by):

How is the current condition of religious free exercise, and religious accommodation in specific, best understood? What is the relationship of the two most important free exercise cases of the past half-century, Employment Division v. Smith and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC? This essay explores four possible answers to these questions.

1. Smith and Hosanna-Tabor are the twin suns of religious accommodation under the Constitution. They are distinctively powerful approaches.
2. Hosanna-Tabor’s approach to constitutional free exercise is now more powerful than Smith’s. Smith has been eclipsed.
3. Hosanna-Tabor has shown itself to be feeble. It has been eclipsed by Smith.
4. Smith augured the waning of religious accommodation, which proceeds apace. Hosanna-Tabor does little to change that.

In describing these possibilities, the essay considers the cases themselves, various doctrinal developments (focusing on subsequent Supreme Court cases as well as lower court decisions interpreting Hosanna-Tabor), and the broader political and social context in which claims for religious accommodation are now received. It concludes that though each possibility has persuasive points (perhaps with the exception of the second), the last is most accurate. Smith’s approach to free exercise continues to control for constitutional purposes and is, for more general political purposes, more entrenched than ever. Its rhetorical hostility to religious accommodation—its admonitions about fabulously remote threats of anarchy in a world where each “conscience is a law unto itself”—has ironically become more apt as a description of the multiplying number of secular interests deemed legally cognizable than of religious accommodation run amok. There is no clearer manifestation of these developments than the recent emergence of theories that expound on the legally cognizable harms—dignitary and otherwise—to third parties that result from religious accommodation. These theories both reflect the enlarged ambit of state authority and defend novel understandings of the limits of religious accommodation. The ministerial exception simply represents the refracted glow of constitutional protection in the gathering gloom. It is free exercise by moonlight.