Eclecticism

This short piece comments on Kent Greenawalt\u27s new book, Religion and the Constitution: Establishment and Fairness. It argues that although Greenawalt\u27s eclectic approach carries certain obvious costs, his theory cannot be evaluated without comparing its advantages and disadvantages to those of its competitors. It concludes by giving some sense of what that comparative calculus might look like

Free Exercise and the Problem of Symmetry

This Article identifies a difficulty with the neutrality paradigm that currently shapes thinking about the Free Exercise Clause both on the Supreme Court and among its leading critics. It proposes a liberty component, shows how it would generate more attractive results than neutrality alone, and defends the liberty approach against likely objections. A controversial neutrality rule currently governs cases brought under the Free Exercise Clause. Under that rule, only laws and policies that have the purpose of discriminating against religion draw heightened scrutiny. All others are presumptively constitutional, regardless of how severely they burden religious practices. Critics have attacked the Court\u27s rule with compelling normative arguments. Curiously, though, the leading academic critics have not directed those arguments against neutrality itself. Rather, they have argued that the Court has adopted the wrong sort of neutrality principle. Instead of purposive neutrality, they call for substantive neutrality. That approach would closely scrutinize not only laws or policies that discriminate purposefully, but also those that have the incidental effect of disadvantaging religion. This Article points out a difficulty with the critics\u27 proposal that it calls the problem of symmetry. In order to qualify as neutral, substantive neutrality must apply in the same way to laws that benefit religion as to laws that burden it. Neutralists could not apply strict substantive neutrality to laws that burden religion, but only the more permissive purposive neutrality to laws that benefit religion. That regime would not be neutral. It would systematically advantage religion in violation of evenhandedness. Some of the leading academic critics recognize that substantive neutrality must resist laws that favor religion as well as those that disfavor it. But many of their practical proposals seem to violate the symmetry constraint. Accommodations of religion, in particular, often have the effect of advantaging religious practices over comparable secular activities. For instance, the critics must strongly support the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which applies strict scrutiny (as a statutory matter) to prison regulations that incidentally but substantially burden religious observance among inmates. The Supreme Court recently upheld that law even though it has the effect of advantaging sacred practices over analogous secular ones. The critics surely must applaud that result. Yet advantaging religious over secular practices is difficult to square with substantive neutrality. Liberty, in contrast to neutrality, is asymmetrical. It protects religious freedom regardless of whether doing so incidentally advantages observance over comparable secular practices. This Article argues that a liberty component is necessary to vindicate the critics\u27 own normative intuitions concerning the proper role of religious freedom in American democracy

The End Of Religious Freedom: What Is at Stake?

In recent work, Steven Smith argues that the American tradition of religious freedom is newly imperiled and may even be nearing exhaustion. This Review puts to one side the substance of that argument and focuses instead on what the stakes might be, should it turn out to be correct. It concludes that the consequences would not be as severe as many people fear

A Democratic Political Economy for the First Amendment

In this Article, I begin building an interpretation of the First Amendment that promotes the practical conditions for a vital democracy. I argue that considerations of distributive justice do properly affect interpretation of free speech and religious liberty. This is true even assuming that those provisions have priority over ordinary law, including economic regulation

Smith in Theory and Practice

Employment Division v. Smith controversially held that general laws that were neutral toward religion would no longer be presumptively invalid, regardless of how much they incidentally burdened religious practices. That decision sparked a debate that continues today, twenty years later. This symposium Essay explores the argument that subsequent courts have in fact been less constrained by the principal rule of Smith than advocates on both sides of the controversy usually assume. Lower courts administering real world disputes often find they have all the room they need to grant relief from general laws, given exceptions written into the decision itself and other mechanisms for circumventing its main rule. While this brief piece does not attempt to prove the empirical claim that Smith has had a limited real-world impact, it gives reasons to think that it might be accurate. Moreover, it tests a similar argument with respect to scholarship, suggesting that even theorists who are sympathetic to Smith nevertheless are more willing to agree to exemptions in particular scenarios than is commonly realized, although important differences of degree and kind still separate them from opponents of the decision and from each other. The Conclusion offers one reason to celebrate this Essay’s depiction of how Smith actually operates, assuming it is correct: Raising awareness of its flexibility in the real world could lower the stakes of the ongoing national conflict over the proper place of religion in American public life

Religion and Social Coherentism

Today, prominent academics are questioning the very possibility of a theory of free exercise or non-establishment. They argue that judgments in the area can only be conclusory or irrational. In contrast to such skeptics, this Essay argues that decisionmaking on questions of religious freedom can be morally justified. Two arguments constitute the Essay. Part I begins by acknowledging that skepticism has power. The skeptics rightly identify some inevitable indeterminacy, but they mistakenly argue that it necessarily signals decisionmaking that is irrational or unjustified. Their critique is especially striking because the skeptics’ prudential way of working on concrete problems actually shares much with the methods of others. Part II then argues that the best defense of religious freedom jurisprudence begins with an approach known as coherentism. In political philosophy, coherentism refers to the way legal actors compare new problems to existing principles and paradigms in order to identify solutions that are justified. The Essay then extracts and emphasizes the social aspects of this basic account. It contends that arguments about the meaning of the Constitution appropriately reflect social and political dynamics. The resulting approach, social coherentism, describes a powerful method for generating interpretations of the First Amendment that are justified, not conclusory. This matters at a moment when some defenders of religious traditionalism are suggesting that principled decisionmaking on questions of religious freedom is impossible, and therefore that such issues should be largely surrendered to political processes

Privatizing and Publicizing Speech

When and how should governments be permitted to use private-law mechanisms to manage their public-law obligations? This short piece poses that question in the context of Summum, which the Supreme Court decided earlier this year, and Buono, which it will hear in the fall. In both cases, the government manipulated formal property rules in order to fend off constitutional challenges. In Summum, the government took ownership of a religious symbol in the face of a free speech challenge, while in Buono it shed ownership of land containing another sectarian symbol in an effort to moot an Establishment Clause problem. Although obvious differences separate the cases, they both raise the deeper question of whether and how governments ought to be able to structure private-law transactions with constitutional rules in mind. That issue, which cuts across a variety of legal fields, deserves more systematic attention

Government Nonendorsement

What are the constitutional limits on government endorsement? Judges and scholars typically assume that when the government speaks on its own account, it faces few restrictions. In fact, they often say that the only real restriction on government speech is the Establishment Clause. On this view, officials cannot endorse, say, Christianity, but otherwise they enjoy wide latitude to promote democracy or denigrate smoking. Two doctrines and their accompanying literatures have fed this impression. First, the Court’s recent free speech cases have suggested that government speech is virtually unfettered. Second, experts on religious freedom have long assumed that there is no Establishment Clause for secular ideas. So today there is a common belief that government is free to endorse secular ideas. But that belief is mistaken. In this Article, I argue that in fact the Constitution properly imposes a broad principle of government nonendorsement. That principle cuts across multiple provisions — including equal protection, due process, and free speech itself — and it shows how they work together to prohibit endorsements that abridge full and equal citizenship in a free society. Situations where official expression runs up against such limitations include racialized speech, electioneering, same-sex marriage exclusions, political gerrymandering, and messages concerning reproduction. Through analysis of these examples, I establish the requirement of government nonendorsement for the first time. Furthermore, I argue that appreciating the constitutional limits on official endorsement leads to new contributions to theoretical debates surrounding political morality, free speech, and religious freedom

Witchcraft and Statecraft: Liberal Democracy in Africa

This Article addresses the prospects of liberal democracy in non-Western societies. It focuses on South Africa, one of the newest and most admired liberal democracies, and in particular on its efforts to recognize indigenous African traditions surrounding witchcraft and related occult practices. In 2004, Parliament passed a law that purports to regulate certain occult practitioners called traditional healers. Today, lawmakers are under pressure to go further and criminalize the practice of witchcraft itself. This Article presses two arguments. First, it contends that the 2004 statute is compatible with liberal principles of equal citizenship and the rule of law. Second, it warns against outlawing witchcraft as such. Subjecting suspected sorcerers to criminal punishment based on governmental determinations of guilt that many will perceive to be unprincipled would work too much damage to individual autonomy and national unity, among other values. These arguments are designed to contribute to a wider discussion about the capacity of liberalism to respond to the global resurgence of religious traditionalism, especially in countries where traditionalists may comprise a large majority of the citizenry

Nonbelievers

How should courts handle nonbelievers who bring religious freedom claims? Although this question is easy to grasp, it presents a genuine puzzle because the religion clauses of the Constitution, along with many contemporary statutes, protect only religion by their terms. From time to time, judges and lawyers have therefore struggled with the place of nonbelievers in the American scheme of religious freedom. Today, this problem is gaining prominence because of nonbelievers’ rising visibility. New lines of social conflict are forming around them, generating disputes that have already gone legal. In this Article, I argue that no wholesale response will do. Nonbelievers and believers should receive comparable protection in some situations but not in others. The method I apply is polyvalent - it seeks to capture the full range of values that should matter, recognizing that the mix of relevant concerns may differ from doctrine to doctrine. Two arguments push against my piecemeal approach, however. First, scholars argue that the term religion should simply be defined to include (or exclude) nonbelievers in advance and for all purposes. Second, leading thinkers have recently criticized the special place of religion in American law. For them, even if nonbelief is not a religion, it should always be treated with similar solicitude. Rejecting both of these positions, I contend that definitional approaches are unlikely to be helpful, and that careful judges will determine the specialness of religion in a variegated way. Applying this method to several doctrines - including antidiscrimination, free exercise exemptions, church autonomy, government endorsement, and public funding - I propose protecting nonbelievers only in some of these areas. In conclusion, I suggest that adjudication of religious freedom claims generally is neither impossible nor senseless, despite the fears of some