Attempting to Engage in Socially Coherent Dialogue About Religious Liberty and Equality

(Excerpt) Most book reviews reflect the reviewer’s final conclusions about the author’s finished work. This review is more of a snapshot of the lengthy dialogue I have been engaged in for several months with Nelson Tebbe, the author of the book being reviewed. The symposium conference organized by the St. John’s Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development in September 2016, invited several church-state scholars to comment on a draft manuscript of Nelson Tebbe’s forthcoming book, Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age. However, the book was not fully completed when this multi-participant dialogue began

The Multiple Sources and Dimensions of Religion-State Frameworks in Liberal Constitutions

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Constitutional Myopia: The Supreme Court\u27s Blindness to Religious Liberty and Religious Equality Values in Town of Greece v. Galloway

It is difficult to analyze a Supreme Court decision that is as fundamentally misguided and unpersuasive as last term’s decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway, the case upholding state-sponsored prayers before Town Board Meetings. In attempting to do so in this Article, I critically evaluate the Court’s repeated failures to adequately address the serious religious equality and religious liberty issues presented in this case. With regard to religious equality concerns, for example, the Court all but completely ignores the Town’s discrimination in favor of established organized churches and against minorities with too few adherents to organize a congregation in the Town, nonaffiliated spiritual residents of the community, and nonreligious residents. Even worse, the Court suggests that allowing low level functionaries to develop informal and imprecise criteria to determine who should be invited to offer prayers at board meetings without adopting a policy or providing any guidance on how these decisions should be reached somehow immunizes the Town from serious constitutional scrutiny. Instead, I argue that this lack of guidelines and policy itself should be understood to violate the First Amendment because it so obviously increases the risk of biased and discriminatory conduct. The Court’s discussion of plaintiffs’ religious liberty concerns is even more untenable. Plaintiffs argued that if a government official or deliberative body has the discretionary authority to make decisions that will seriously impact the needs and interests of individuals or small groups of citizens, it is intrinsically coercive for those officials to ask these citizens to engage in a religious exercise such as a prayer before they submit their arguments or petitions to government decisionmakers. In order to reject these claims, Justice Kennedy describes an understanding of social reality that is difficult to believe and impossible to share. Perhaps most egregiously, Kennedy’s analysis treats prayer as if it is some kind of abstract ceremonial activity instead of what it is for most Americans—a personal, meaningful communication between the individual and G-D. The Article concludes with a discussion of the possible implications of this decision for the constitutional protection of religious liberty and equality in other contexts and circumstances

Taking Free Exercise Rights Seriously

March 30, 2006 Professor Alan E. Brownstein, University of California, Davis School of Law Presented by: Center for Professional Ethics William A. Brahms Lecture on Law and Religion Constitutional law does not take free exercise rights seriously. Creating a more complex free exercise jurisprudence • How do we balance religious exercise against conflicting state interests? Professor Brownstein is an expert on church-state issues and has also written extensively on freedom of speech, privacy and autonomy rights and other constitutional law subjects. His articles have been published in numerous academic journals, including the Stanford Law Review. Professor Brownstein teaches Constitutional Law, Law and Religion, and Torts at the UC Davis School of Law, is a frequent lecturer at academic conferences and in law related programs before civic, legal, religious and educational groups. He received his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1977