Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Center Papers & Activities in 2019

Here is a retrospective list of some of our papers and activities in 2019, with links where available. A warm thanks to our readers, and best wishes for the new year!

Papers

DeGirolami, The Traditions of American Constitutional Law (forthcoming, Notre Dame Law Review 2020).

Movsesian, Masterpiece Cakeshop and the Future of Religious Freedom, 42 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 711 (2019).

DeGirolami, First Amendment Traditionalism (forthcoming, Wash. U. L. Rev. 2020).

Movsesian, The Armenian Genocide Today, First Things, November.

DeGirolami, The Sickness Unto Death of the First Amendment, 31 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 751 (2019).

Movsesian, Tertullian and the Rise of Religious Freedom, University Bookman, August.

DeGirolami, Notes on a New Fusion, Liberty Fund, July.

Movsesian, Interpreting the Bladensburg Cross Case, First Things, June.

DeGirolami, Cross Purposes, Public Discourse, June.

Movsesian, The Devout and the Nones, First Things, April.

DeGirolami, Jurisprudence as an Expression of Character, Liberty Fund, January.

Activities

Conversation with Hon. Kyle Duncan (5th Circuit) and Hon. Richard Sullivan (2d Circuit) on church-state issues at the Supreme Court.

Legal Spirits (podcast series concerning law and religion).

In spring 2019, DeGirolami was a fellow in the James Madison Program in Princeton University’s Department of Politics.

DeGirolami, Panel on Keith Whittington’s “Repugnant Laws,” James Madison Program, Princeton University, November.

Movsesian, “Church-State Relations in a Time of Scandal,” Morningside Institute, September.

Movsesian, Constitution Day Lecture, The King’s College, September.

DeGirolami, “The Supreme Court’s New Traditionalism,” Skidmore College, September.

DeGirolami, “The Constitution, the Courts, and Conservatism,” Hertog Foundation, July.

The Center for Law and Religion colonizes the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy! June.

Movsesian, “Religion and the Administrative State,” Center for the Study of the Administrative State, George Mason University, March.

DeGirolami, “Free Exercise of Religion and Free Speech,” AALS Law and Religion Conference, January.

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Legal Spirits Episode 017: Tanzin v. Tanvir and Individual Liability Under RFRA

In this podcast, we discuss the Second Circuit opinion in Tanzin v. Tanvir, the Supreme Court’s second law-and-religion case this term, about whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act contemplates liability for individual federal officers. Along the way, we consider some of the divided cultural backdrop against which this somewhat technical question will be decided. Listen in on our final podcast of 2019!

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Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Wilson & Drakeman’s Church-State Reader

I’m delighted to notice this new church-state reader put together by John F. Wilson (Princeton, emeritus) and our longtime friend and center board member, Donald L. Drakeman, Church and State in American History: Key Documents, Decisions, and Commentary from Five Centuries (4th edition, Routledge). Don kindly informs me that what is new about this edition of the reader is a greatly expanded historical section before the American founding, beginning with the Biblical texts and proceeding through the early Christian and medieval era. It also has the American context, the big Supreme Court cases, and so on.

Every time I teach a church-state course of any kind, I cobble together material from a number of different sources as a kind of rapid introduction for students to this area of the law. This book looks like a handy solution. And I’m sure it’s written with Don’s typical flair and panache.

Here is the description from Routledge:

Church and State in American History illuminates the complex relationships among the political and religious authority structures of American society, and illustrates why church-state issues have remained controversial since our nation’s founding. It has been in classroom use for over 50 years.

John Wilson and Donald Drakeman explore the notion of America as “One Nation Under God” by examining the ongoing debate over the relationship of church and state in the United States. Prayers and religious symbols in schools and other public spaces, school vouchers and tax support for faith-based social initiatives continue to be controversial, as are arguments among advocates of pro-choice and pro-life positions. The updated 4th edition includes selections from colonial charters, Supreme Court decisions, and federal legislation, along with contemporary commentary and incisive interpretations by modern scholars. Figures as divergent as John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, James Madison, John F. Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor speak from these pages, as do Robert Bellah, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

The continuing public and scholarly interest in this field, as well as a significant evolution in the Supreme Court’s church-state jurisprudence, renders this timely re-edition as essential reading for students of law, American History, Religion, and Politics.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

On Blue Laws

Here is something interesting from a book I’m reviewing now by Professor Greg Weiner, The Political Constitution: The Case Against Judicial Supremacy, which takes Justice Felix Frankfurter’s later views of constitutional jurisprudence as in some respects a model for today. Here, Weiner discusses Frankfurter’s view of the Blue Laws, which forbade a wide range of commercial activities on Sunday in order to recognize the sabbath day for Christians, in a famous case called McGowan v. Maryland (1961). The Court upheld these laws for a rather peculiar reason: that “the record is barren” of reasons to *disprove* that forbidding the sales of certain products on Sunday does not contribute to the rationalized well-being of the citizenry.

Justice Frankfurter concurred. Here is a bit from the book with some material from the Frankfurter opinion quoted:

The effect of the law was to set Sundays apart as ‘a day of rest not merely in a physical, hygienic sense, but in the sense of a recurrent time in the cycle of human activity when the rhythms of existence changed, a day of particular associations which came to have their own autonomous values for life.’ Perhaps most important, rather than seeing the case as one pitting lone objectors against the state, Frankfurter recognized the individual’s situation in the context of a political community whose ‘spirit…expresses in goodly measure the heritage which links it to its past’ and which could reasonably decide to create an ‘atmosphere of general repose’ that would be disrupted by exempting individuals from the law.

In other words, the majority of the community was entitled to impose regulations that created what it regarded as conditions for living a good life, which included leisure, community interaction, and, yes, a particular convenience for members of the dominant religion….The religious heritage of blue laws was part of the traditions of a community, which could not regard itself as existing simply in the here and now. (97-98)

I’ll have more to say about the book, and claims like the one above, soon.