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Nichols (ed.), “Marriage and Divorce in a Multicultural Context: Multi-Tiered Marriage and the Boundaries of Civil Law and Religion”

Today, Cambridge University Press publishes Marriage and Divorce in a51hSPzHqugL__BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_ Multicultural Context: Multi-Tiered Marriage and the Boundaries of Civil Law and Religion, edited by Joel A. Nichols (University of St. Thomas, Minnesota). The publisher’s description follows.

American family law makes two key assumptions: first, that the civil state possesses sole authority over marriage and divorce; and second, that the civil law may contain only one regulatory regime for such matters. These assumptions run counter to the multicultural and religiously plural nature of our society. They are also wrong. This book elaborates how those assumptions are descriptively incorrect, and it begins an important conversation about whether more pluralism in family law is normatively desirable. For example, may couples rely upon religious tribunals (Jewish, Muslim, or otherwise) to decide family law disputes? May couples opt into stricter divorce rules, either through premarital contracts or “covenant marriages?” How should the state respond when couples purport to do these things? Intentionally interdisciplinary and international in scope, this volume contains contributions from fourteen leading scholars. The authors address the provocative question of whether the state must consider sharing its jurisdictional authority with other groups in family law.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

European Court Rules Clergy Cannot Unionize Over Church’s Objection

In a much-anticipated decision, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled today, 11-6, that Romania did not violate the European Human Rights Convention when it refused to register a trade union that Romanian Orthodox priests had formed against the wishes of the Romanian Orthodox Church. The decision, with important implications for church autonomy, overrules a contrary judgment by a chamber of the court last year.

Article 11 of the European Convention grants citizens–including, the Grand Chamber ruled today, clergy–the right to form trade unions, subject to restrictions that are necessary to advance legitimate governmental interests, including the “protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” Here, the Grand Chamber reasoned, Romania had restricted the priests’ right to form a union in order to protect the autonomy of Romanian Orthodox Church. Among other things, the proposed union was meant to promote members’ ability to obtain representation in the Holy Synod, the Church’s highest authority, and to strike in order to advance members’ interests within the Church. By registering a union with goals like these, the Grand Chamber reasoned, the state would hamper the ability of the Church to organize and govern itself according to its own rules:

Respect for the autonomy of religious communities … implies, in particular, that the State should accept the right of such communities to react, in accordance with their own rules and interests, to any dissident movements emerging within them that might pose a threat to their cohesion, image or unity. It is … not the task of the national authorities to act as the arbiter between religious communities and the various dissident factions that exist or may emerge within them.

In other words, because the union posed a real risk to the organizational integrity of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Romania was justified in refusing to register the union–particularly given the wide “margin of appreciation” the Convention grants states with respect to church/state relations.

The Grand Chamber’s decision contains language suggesting a sweeping view of church autonomy, but one could also see it as somewhat narrow. The Grand Chamber noted that nothing would stop clergy from forming a union “that pursues aims compatible with the Church’s Statute and does not call into question the Church’s traditional hierarchical structure and decision-making procedures.” And it emphasized the the fact-specific nature of the inquiry, stating at one point that “national courts must … conduct[] an in-depth examination of the circumstances of [a] case and a thorough balancing exercise between the competing interests at stake.” The resistance to a categorical rule is reminiscent of the US Supreme Court’s analysis in Hosanna-Tabor, the “ministerial exception” case. A third-party submission by the Becket Fund and the International Center for Law and Religion Studies discussed Hosanna-Tabor, but the Grand Chamber did not expressly rely on the American decision in its own reasoning.

The case is Sindicatul Pastoral cel Bun v. Romania (July 9, 2013), available at the ECtHR’s website, here. The Becket Fund’s press release about the decision is here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Annicchino on Religious Autonomy

For our followers who read Italian, CLR Forum guest poster Pasquale Annicchino (European University Institute) has posted a comparative essay on religious autonomy in the US and Europe, The Conflict between the Autonomy of Religious Groups and Other Fundamental Rights: Recent Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. Here’s the abstract:

The principle of autonomy of religious groups has acquired new importance in the recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. This article will analyze and compare the decisions by these two courts, with a particular focus on the circulation of legal arguments between the two different legal orders.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

UK Supreme Court Decides Important Ministerial Employment Case

Yesterday, the UK’s Supreme Court decided an important ministerial employment case, President of the Methodist Conference v. Preston. In many respects, Preston tracks the US Supreme Court’s recent ministerial exception case, Hosanna-Tabor, though the British case does not refer to Hosanna-Tabor and doesn’t explicitly address church autonomy concerns.

In Preston, a Methodist minister sought relief under UK employment law for unfair dismissal. The question turned on whether Preston was an “employee” for purposes of the law, which, in turn, depended on whether she worked for the church under a “contract of employment.”  By a 4-1 vote, the Supreme Court held that she did not.

In the past, Lord Sumption’s opinion explained, UK cases drew a bright line between clergy, who were understood to hold offices of an essentially spiritual nature, and mere employees. But these rulings depended on “social instincts” that do not obtain in today’s more “secular and regulated context.” Today, the question turns on the precise terms that govern a minister’s employment. In other words, the UK courts must apply what Americans would recognize as a “neutral principles of law” approach. Courts must look at the terms of a minister’s employment in light of the surrounding circumstances to see what the parties reasonably intended.

Here, Lord Sumption wrote, the context made plain that Methodist ministers like Preston are not contractual employees. Preston had no contract with the church; her employment was governed completely by the church’s constitution. Her ordination, conferred by the laying on of hands, was understood to be a lifelong covenant. Her stipend was not seen as consideration for her work, but as a subsidy to allow her to serve the Lord. In short, by its terms, ministry in the Methodist Church was “a vocation, by which candidates submit themselves to the discipline of the church for life.” No special circumstances in Preston’s case altered this conclusion.

In its insistence on looking to the particular circumstances of a plaintiff’s employment, Preston echoes the flexible approach to the definition of minister that one sees in Hosanna-Tabor. Unlike the American court, though, the British court didn’t much address the underlying church autonomy values that ministerial exceptions serve. In large part, this reticence results from the different texts the courts were construing. Preston is a straightforward statutory question without constitutional implications; Hosanna-Tabor, by contrast, depends on an understanding of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment.

(H/t: Law & Religion UK).

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Another Episcopal Church Property Dispute

This time it’s in South Carolina. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required)  on litigation between two rival factions in the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina. One faction, representing the leadership and about two-thirds of the membership, broke away from the national Episcopal Church in November over the national body’s liberal approach to sexuality and other issues. The minority faction has remained loyal to the national body. Both factions assert ownership of the diocese’s property, including St. Michael’s Church in Charleston (above). In total, the diocese’s church buildings, grounds, and cemeteries are worth around $500 million.

Church property disputes have become increasingly common in America, as local congregations distance themselves from more liberal national church bodies. In the Episcopal Church alone, there have been a dozen such disputes in the past few decades. Human nature being what it is, each side in such a dispute thinks of itself as the true depository of the faith, with a moral, and legal, right to church property.

Civil courts have adopted a couple of different approaches to resolving such disputes, depending on how the relevant legal instruments are written: the “deference” approach, which defers to the decision of the highest authority within the church structure, and the “neutral principles of law” approach, which attempts to resolve disputes using standard property law principles. Both approaches try to promote church autonomy by insulating internal church government and theological questions from civil court review.

I’m not sure which approach the South Carolina courts take. At the moment, the fight is whether the litigation should be in South Carolina courts at all. The national body is seeking to remove the action to federal court, where, I assume, it thinks it will get a more receptive hearing. Whichever court hears the case, the track record of prior litigation suggests the national body should be confident of ultimate victory –though of course it depends on how the deeds, trust documents, and bylaws are written. For civil-law purposes, the Episcopal Church is a hierarchical church, and courts would normally defer to the highest authority within the church–I assume that’s the national body– on ownership of church property. That’s what happened in a recent case involving the Fall Church in Virginia. If the national body wants to recognize the smaller, loyal faction as the rightful owners of church property, the majority faction will likely have to find somewhere else to pray.

Posted on by JCPW

Helfand on Implied Consent and the Contraception Mandate

Michael Helfand (Pepperdine University School of Law) has posted What is a ‘Church’?: Implied Consent and the Contraception Mandate. The abstract follows.

This Article considers the “religious employer” exception to the “contraception mandate” – that is, the “preventative care” requirements announced by Department of Health and Human Services pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This exception has triggered significant litigation with a variety of employers claiming that they have been excluding from the “religious employer” classification in violation of both the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In considering these claims, this Article applies an “implied consent” framework to these cases, which grounds the authority of religious institutions in the presumed consent of their members. On such an account, consent can be assumed so long as members understood the unique religious objectives of the institution when they joined, thereby implicitly authorizing the institution to make rules related to accomplishing these uniquely religious objectives. Building on this implied consent framework, this Article argues that the First Amendment should protect institutions from the requirements of the contraception mandate so long as these institutions were both organized around a core religious mission and where that religious mission was open and obvious to employees. In such circumstances, courts should presume that employees recognized the unique religious objectives of their employer and thereby implicitly authorized their employer to make rules related to achieving these religious goals.

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Brownstein on the Religious Liberty of Religious Institutions

Alan E. Brownstein (University of California, Davis – School of Law) has posted Protecting the Religious Liberty of Religious Institutions. The abstract follows.

This article is a preliminary inquiry into the question of whether the freedom of the Church, as a distinct religious institution, can be justified from an American legal perspective. The first part of the article identifies respect for the individual dignity and autonomy of the person as a primary justification for providing distinctive legal protection to religious liberty. It goes on to discuss whether distinctive religious liberty protection for religious institutions can be derived from the dignitary interests of the institution’s members – and if so, whether there is some limit beyond which institutional religious liberty claims cannot be grounded in the individual dignitary interests of congregants or constituents.

The second and longer part of the Article examines whether an argument for protecting and accommodating the autonomy of religious institutions can be grounded in American history during the 1700’s and early 1800’s. The history of this period includes multiple cross currents of values and interests that very by time and region – making it difficult to reach more than tentative conclusions. However, the Protestant commitment by religious liberty proponents to the belief that each man must judge for himself on matters relating to religion, the virulent anti-Catholicism of the period, at least some of which may be attributed to fear of and antipathy toward top down ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the prevalence of anti-clerical attitudes suggest some limits to the American commitment to the freedom of the Church as an institution. Clearly, a sphere of religious liberty extended to the local congregation and to a considerable extent to democratically created and accountable ecclesiastical decision-making bodies. It may be argued, however, that Americans of this period viewed non-democratic, hierarchical religious institutional structures – that challenged the intrinsic right of individual conscience in matters of faith – to be much less deserving of respect and protection.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Hearing at ECtHR in Spanish Church Autonomy Case

This has been a busy law-and-religion news week in the United States, but there was a major story at the European Court of Human Rights as well. On Wednesday, the Grand Chamber heard argument in Fernández Martínez v. Spain, a case that could have major implications for church autonomy in Europe.

Under the 1979 Concordat between Spain and the Holy See, public schools in Spain must offer optional classes in Catholicism. The instructors are public employees, but must be approved by local bishops. In Fernández Martínez, a public school refused to renew the contract of one such teacher, a married, laicized priest named José Fernández Martínez, after the local bishop voiced his objections. The bishop argued that Fernández Martínez had “given scandal,” an offense under canon law, by allowing himself to be photographed by a newspaper, along with his family, at a meeting of a group calling for optional priestly celibacy. Fernández Martínez claimed that the dismissal violated his rights to privacy, family life, and expression, but the Spanish Constitutional Court and, last May, a chamber of the ECtHR, disagreed. He then sought review in the Grand Chamber.

Wednesday’s hearing was interesting and, at times, fiery. The government presented the case as a straightforward matter of religious autonomy and state neutrality. The bishop had objected to Fernández Martínez on religious grounds, it explained; given the terms of the Concordat, the government had no choice but to defer. The government surely could not second-guess the bishop’s conclusion that someone charged with teaching Catholicism had violated religious law.  The government emphasized that the Church did not have Read more

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Hatzis on Anti-Discrimination Law and Clergy in the U.K.

Nicholas Hatzis (University of Oxford) has posted The Church-Clergy Relationship and Anti-Discrimination Law. The abstract follows.

Should antidiscrimination norms apply to the relationship between a religious group and its clergy? In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v EEOC the US Supreme Court affirmed the existence of a “ministerial exception” which bars discrimination claims by ministers of religion against their church. In 2005 the House of Lords had reached the opposite conclusion, ruling, in Percy v Board of National Mission of the Church of Scotland, that the decision to dismiss an ordained minister was not a spiritual matter falling outside the scope of secular law. This article examines the constitutional foundations of the ministerial exception, argues that Percy ignored important aspects of church autonomy and suggests that courts should consider creating a narrowly tailored rule exempting decisions to appoint or remove clergy from the scope of anti-discrimination law.

 

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Thanks to Barak Richman and Dan Crane

Thanks to Barak Richman and Dan Crane for participating in our first online debate at CLR Forum, “Are Conservative Rabbis a Cartel?” You can follow the posts by scrolling to the “Debates” category over on the right. We’re very grateful for the thoughtful and fun exchange. Come back soon!