Posted on by Liam Ray

Around the Web this Week

Here is a look at some law and religion news stories from around the web this week:

Posted on by L&R Forum

Bradley: Religious Liberty vs. Moral Autonomy

All this month, the Law and Religion Forum hosts an online symposium on Vincent Phillip Muñoz‘s new article, “Two Concepts of Religious Liberty.” In this post, Gerard V. Bradley (Notre Dame) responds to Muñoz’s arguments. For other posts in the series, please click here. 

One need not be a hide-bound originalist to delight in Phillip Munoz’ attentiveness to the letter of the Constitution. He is quite right to say that the First Amendment enacts “an absolute ban” on something, that its character is “categorical”; after all, “Congress shall make no law.” Munoz is right again to count this character as probative evidence of the “jurisdictional” understanding of the Free Exercise Clause which he defends. He is right also to see that any such “categorical” liberty has to be limited to a set of specific acts, such as worship and confessions of faith, lest letting the spirit roam where it wills (recall: no law!) does not produce anarchy, even as it limits government in favor of each individual’s direction of his or her religious life.

Munoz is also right about the Smith case and thus the original understanding of the Free Exercise Clause. The Court in Smith spent most of its time arguing against the “exemptionist” (Munoz’ term) interpretation of Free Exercise, minted 27 years earlier in Sherbert v. Verner. But without quite identifying it as such, the Court hit upon the meaning of Free Exercise apprehended by the  ratifiers:

[A]ssembling with others for a worship service, participating in sacramental use of bread and wine, proselytizing, abstaining from certain foods or certain modes of transportation . . . [A] state would be “prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” if it sought to ban such acts . . . only when they are engaged in for religious reasons, or only because of the religious belief that they display.

The decisive feature of Free Exercise, then, is not exemptionism’s idealized “neutrality of effect,” but rather what might be called “neutrality of reasons.” John Locke provided a Read more

Posted on by L&R Forum · 2 Comments

Munoz: Justice Scalia was Right about Religious Free Exercise

All this month, the Law and Religion Forum hosts an online symposium on Vincent Phillip Muñoz‘s new article, “Two Concepts of Religious Liberty.” In this leadoff post, Muñoz summarizes his argument. For other posts in the series, please click here. 

“[I]t is proper to keep in mind, that all power in just & free Govts. is derived from Compact . . .”

– James Madison, “On Sovereignty,” (1835)

In the wake of Antonin Scalia’s untimely passing earlier this year, originalists and conservatives praised the Justice’s legacy with one notable exception—his majority opinion in the Free Exercise Clause case, Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith (1990). Stanford Law Professor Michael McConnell identified Smith as his least favorite Scalia opinion. Michael Stokes Paulsen went even further, writing an entire essay about Smith titled, “Justice Scalia’s Worst Opinion.” Calling it a “constitutional disaster,” Paulsen, who holds a Distinguished University Chair at the University of St. Thomas, claimed that Scalia overturned the only interpretation “that makes sense of the decision to have a free exercise clause in the first place” and overthrew the “understanding [that] accords with the founding generation’s understanding of religious freedom as a ‘natural right.’” Even for a “fainthearted” originalist, as Scalia once labeled himself, that is harsh criticism.

I certainly agree that Scalia’s Smith opinion has significant shortcomings (including everything about “hybrid rights”), but from an originalist perspective, its basic conclusion is correct. I’ll go even further: Justice Scalia’s non-exemptionist reading of the Free Exercise Clause is the only construction consistent with the American founders’ natural rights political philosophy and their attendant social compact constitutionalism. As much as I admire the scholarship of McConnell, Paulsen, and other originalist defenders of the Sherbert approach, they are simply wrong when they claim the founders’ natural rights constitutionalism supports a constitutional right to exemptions.

Let me start, however, with a point of agreement. I applaud Professors McConnell and Paulsen for emphasizing the founders’ understanding of religious liberty as a natural right. Recovering the idea of natural rights is essential to contest the idea that the state grants religious liberty and can limit it according to its own interests and preferences.

The founders rejected the language of toleration, because toleration presumes that the state possesses legitimate authority over religious exercises. Instead, the founders recognized that the right of religious liberty inheres in the individual prior to state recognition. Individuals possess a right of Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Online Symposium: Two Concepts of Religious Liberty

The Law and Religion Forum is delighted to host an online symposium this month on Vincent Phillip Muñoz‘s new article, “Two Concepts of Religious Liberty: The Natural Rights and Moral Autonomy Approaches to the Free Exercise of Religion,” which appears in the current volume of the American Political Science Review (May 2016). Among other things, Muñoz (Notre Dame) argues that, from an originalist perspective, the late Justice Antonin Scalia was correct, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), that the Free Exercise Clause does not require the state to grant believers accommodations from generally applicable and neutral laws. The Framers’ version of natural rights constitutionalism, he contends, does not require religious exemptions. The original meaning of the clause thus confirms Scalia’s reading.

Muñoz leads off the symposium with a post today. Throughout the month of September, we will post responses from Gerard Bradley (Notre Dame), Donald Drakeman (Notre Dame), Matthew Franck (Witherspoon Institute), George Thomas (Claremont McKenna), Jack Rakove (Stanford), and Corey Brettschneider (Brown). Muñoz will return at the end to offer his thoughts on the respondents’ contributions. Enjoy!

 

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

When Death is Better than the Alternative?

My friend, Tom Berg, has this response to my post about Free Exercise Clause atrophy. He and I don’t see things too differently, though he is as usual more optimistic than I am. I think he undersells what can be read from the Stormans cert. denial. And the denial of cert. in Ben-Levi v. Brown (again with a J. Alito dissent). And the denial of cert. in Big Sky Colony, where I was also pleased to join another excellent amicus brief spearheaded by Tom himself urging review of the Free Exercise Clause issues. The Court just doesn’t want any part of these issues right now.

But Tom’s post makes me think that perhaps atrophy may actually be the best option on offer. Tom writes that “moderate-ish” liberals might be able to combine with the likes of Justice Alito to hear a case involving “state/local government action against Muslims, or against some other group that everyone agrees is a religious minority.” That is because “liberal opinion” has accepted the various third-party-harms theories being floated about, and because of the expansion of the idea of harm “that modern welfare-state liberalism regards as ‘public.'”

I think I agree with most of Tom’s description here. Tom is probably right that, e.g., Christians with certain specific beliefs about sexuality are not and will never be, in the “liberal opinion” he refers to, the sort of viable “minorities” thought to deserve FEC protection. That “liberal opinion” is powerful now, growing, and likely to influence the ideological profile of the Supreme Court directly and indirectly for years to come. If that is true, then perhaps we should root for atrophy, if not death. Better the Smith rule, which at least has the advantage of being clear and reasonably predictable, than the rule of “liberal opinion” masquerading as constitutional law. Indeed, perhaps religious accommodation has always been infected by something of this quality. We accommodate when we don’t really care–for prison beards, oddballs, and tiny, exotic sects to which nobody really pays attention. When we do care, we find ways not to accommodate (harm! third parties! dignity!). And as the ambit of the “public” increases, it becomes easier and easier to make claims about third party harms, particularly when those harms cut to the quick of “liberal opinion.”

A participant in our colloquium in law at St. John’s this spring, and a noted critic of religious accommodation (someone, as it happens, whose views in general don’t often match up with my own), suggested that if given a choice between non-discriminatory religious persecution and religious discrimination, he’d opt for religious persecution. I can’t say I agree. But this exchange makes me understand that view much more clearly.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Atrophic Free Exercise Clause

The Supreme Court has had essentially nothing of substance to say about it over the last 23 years. The contraction of whatever rights are protected by it proceeds apace. In this article a couple of years ago, I noted that religious accommodation–

one of the most vital issues of religious free exercise that at one time implicated the Free Exercise Clause directly—has by now largely become entirely statutory. The Roberts Court has decided or issued substantive orders in 4 cases involving either RFRA or RLUIPA [excluding the nonprofit contraception mandate litigation]. In the same period it has decided only one case (perhaps) partially about the Free Exercise Clause, a case in any event that is arguably not about religious accommodation at all and that represents a carve-out from general free exercise principles. The single case that brought both statutory and free exercise claims was resolved solely on the basis of the statutory claim without any decision as to free exercise.

It is tempting to attribute the reason for this transition from the Free Exercise Clause to statute law entirely to the holding of Employment Division v. Smith, which ostensibly precluded judicial review as to laws that are neutral and of general application. To be sure, the rule announced in Smith has contracted the number of Free Exercise Clause challenges. And yet there are features of Smith—most notably the issue of the meaning of “general applicability” and the scope of what I have elsewhere described as the “individual-assessment exception” to Smith—that have suggested to several lower courts that accommodations are constitutionally required far more often than may appear under Smith. To date, however, the Supreme Court has declined to hear any cases raising a direct challenge to Smith.

The enfeeblement of the Free Exercise Clause continues. Last week, the Court denied cert. in Stormans v. Wiesman (with Justice Alito dissenting from the denial, in an opinion joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Thomas), a case about Washington State’s regulations requiring the stocking of drugs in pharmacies that provided exemptions for various secular reasons (business reasons, for example) but not for religious reasons. The case presented a golden opportunity for the Court to clarify what exactly “generally applicable” means under the test given to us a full generation ago by Employment Division v. Smith. Both Mark and I joined an excellent amicus brief urging the Court to do so.

No dice. Disappointing, but not surprising. Justice Kennedy, after all, was in the Smith majority, and while he authored the majority opinion in Lukumi-Babalu, his opinion offered a rather confused and confusing reading of general applicability (Justice Scalia’s concurrence was much better on this point). He joined four other Justices in denying cert.

But the larger point is that the Free Exercise Clause, at least as a possible source of accommodation, is increasingly a dead letter. Unless one has evidence of explicit discriminatory motivation in the making of exceptions (and it’s got to be really explicit), one should expect the Clause to offer nothing. The Court has little interest in saying anything else about the Free Exercise Clause, other than raising it as a kind of weak, pseudo-justification for carve-outs like the ministerial exception.

There are all sorts of political and cultural reasons for the atrophying of the Free Exercise Clause, of course. Some of those reasons are, I plan to argue in a new paper tentatively titled Religious Accommodation, Religious Tradition, and Political Polarization, pretty good reasons. But whatever the reasons–good or bad–they are not going away. In a generation or less, the Free Exercise Clause may well find itself in the company of the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the Third Amendment.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Witte & Nichols, “Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment” (4th ed)

In April, Oxford University Press released the fourth edition of Religion and the American 9780190459420Constitutional Experiment, by John Witte, Jr. (Emory) and Joel Nichols (St. Thomas-Minnesota). The publisher’s description follows:

This accessible introduction tells the American story of religious liberty from its colonial beginnings to the latest Supreme Court cases. The authors provide extensive analysis of the formation of the First Amendment religion clauses and the plausible original intent or understanding of the founders. They describe the enduring principles of American religious freedom–liberty of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious equality, religious pluralism, separation of church and state, and no establishment of religion–as those principles were developed by the founders and applied by the Supreme Court. Successive chapters analyze the two hundred plus Supreme Court Read more

Posted on by Robert J. Delahunty

Justice Scalia and Conservatism

TP Banner

This posting was originally a short speech given to students at the University of St. Thomas Law School on February 29.

We will all miss the unique and iconic personality of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Few if any Supreme Court Justices have been gifted with such charm, humor, charisma and pizzazz. He was a man of great faith; a brilliant and memorable writer; a witty raconteur; a powerful and bracing intellect. He argued law, as he lived life, with passion and gusto. In his impact on the American public, he was in a class of his own: among the Justices of the past, perhaps only Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert Jackson, and Thurgood Marshall can be compared to him. One might even say, with all due deference to Senator Cruz, that Justice Scalia was the living epitome of New York values.

But we are here to discuss his influence on the law, especially on constitutional law. And for all his great and varied gifts, his long tenure on the supreme bench, and the vigor and clarity of his opinions, his influence on constitutional law, at least judged from our current perspective, was very limited.

The two doctrines one associates most closely with Scalia’s jurisprudence are, of course, originalism and textualism. Others on this panel will no doubt discuss them, and I will say something about them a bit later. But what I want to consider briefly here is another important but neglected strand in his jurisprudence: his use of custom or tradition in constitutional adjudication. This aspect of his jurisprudence is, in my view, the most distinctively conservative element of it. There is no inherent connection between textualism or originalism and conservatism, but there is such a connection between custom and conservatism.

Nineteenth century legal conservatives such as James Coolidge Carter went so far as to identify law with custom. Or more accurately, they identified the common law with custom. One could say, in that spirit, that the common law identifies, articulates, stabilizes, and occasionally revises and improves, custom. And much of American Read more

Posted on by geraldrussello

RLUIPA and compelling government interests

Well this is good news. An Anglican church in Jacksonville Beach has received permission to build a new church, over two rejections from the local planning board. A court found that under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) the community had the right to build their church.

Controversy over building churches occurs much more often than one would think, at least to me. Many communities do not want them, and provide for zoning plans to exclude them (and, it is true, many other types of non-residential buildings) from residential zones. Although there is a healthy debate about whether this kind of zoning makes sense as a matter of planning, RLUIPA is directed at the particular issue of preventing discrimination against religious buildings and treating them differently from other kinds of structures.

The Church of Our Savior purchased plots of land on which to build their church. Although the town planning department approved the application, the planning commission rejected it, citing concerns unspecified in the opinion about the traffic and the “character” of the neighborhood. A further refinement of the proposed plan, including turning part of the plot into a public park, failed to satisfy the commission. The town promptly changed its zoning code to try to neutralize the church’s claim it was being treated unequally.

The court wrote a thorough opinion addressing the RLUIPA claims. Simply denying a church a permit to build, or to require changes to a building plan, do not “substantially burden” a religious group’s rights under RLUIPA. Land is finite and, as is taught in law school, each parcel is unique. Market conditions, and not government action, are often the cause of a religious group not getting the property it wishes. Accordingly, the Court rejected most of the church’s claims of RLUIPA violation as a general principle.

However, the Court upheld a RLUIPA claim, as applied to the church, finding that the planning commission had treated it unequally. The commission had recently approved a very similar application for a school, and could not, to the Court’s satisfaction, articulate a “compelling government interest” that justified a full rejection of the Church’s plan. The commission asserted an interest in “preserving the character and safety of its residential neighborhoods through enforcement of its zoning regulations …. Even assuming that this constitutes a compelling government interest under RLUIPA, the Court finds that a blanket denial of the Church’s application was not narrowly tailored to further that interest.”

This seems like the right result.  Since the church location was near a large street and an amusement park, it is difficult to see how their parking spaces and 200-person church would affect the “character” of the neighborhood. What seems to have (rightly) bothered the court is the sudden change in the zoning code and its obvious unequal treatment of the church.  This kind of last-minute objection and inarticulate “character” assertions are exactly the kind of arguments RLUIPA holds up to scrutiny, but one can’t help but wonder how many times they prevail.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

On the State RFRA Contretemps: Doug Laycock (and Me)

Two little items to report. First, Professor Doug Laycock has a very good piece at the Religion and Politics Blog.

Second, I participated in a Bloomberg Law podcast with Professor Robert Katz on these issues. I thought we had a useful exchange. At the end of the interview, however, Rob was asked a question about the relevance of Hobby Lobby to these matters, to which he responded essentially that the two were disconnected. I didn’t get a chance to jump in (had to leave to teach class!) but I have a different view and thought this quote from Doug’s piece was apt:

For the first time in American history, government had made it unlawful, at least if you were an employer, to practice a well-known teaching of the largest religions in the country. The same-sex marriage debate has the same feature. This attempt to suppress practices of the largest faiths is a new thing in the American experience. And this huge escalation in the level of government regulation of religious practices is of course producing a reaction from religious conservatives, and is part of the reason for the current polarization.