Reconstructing RFRA: The Contested Legacy of Religious Freedom Restoration

Almost every member of Congress voted to approve the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), a bill endorsed by an unprecedented coalition of dozens of religious and civil rights organizations spanning the political and ideological spectrum. President Clinton quipped at the signing ceremony that perhaps only divine intervention could explain such an unusual meeting of the minds: the establishment of “new trust” across otherwise irreconcilable “ideological and religious lines,” he remarked, “shows . . . that the power of God is such that, even in the legislative process, miracles can happen.” The RFRA consensus was especially “miraculous” because the legislation addressed a deeply divisive question: whether and under what circumstances religious objectors should be exempt from generally applicable laws. RFRA’s supporters, both within and outside Congress, would surely have had sharp disagreements about many specific claims for religious exemptions to particular laws. Yet they coalesced around RFRA, which circumvented such disagreements at the retail level by codifying a “cross-cutting” statutory standard that judges would be required to apply to an undifferentiated and unknown array of future claims for exemptions to every generally applicable law in the land

The Future and Past of U.S. Foreign Relations Law

The increasing role that the US plays in the world can only mean a correspondingly greater role for foreign affairs law in the US legal community. The Supreme Court has recently cited international and comparative law materials to a striking, and all but unprecedented, degree

External Versus Internal in International Law

The issues and analyses in this issue of the Fordham International Law Journal provide excellent cases for testing how a conventional approach would mediate current external pressures for legal change on current international and foreign relations law commitments. As it turns out, the results suggest that sovereigntist concerns are overblown, but that internationalist advocates ignore them completely at their peril

Organic plant breeding

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. To a major extent, organic farming depends currently on plant and animal varieties that have been bred for non-organic farming and that are often not suited to organic production. This position is inconsistent with a holistic approach to organic agriculture. Organically-bred plant varieties are needed to develop both the potential of organic agriculture and its integrity. A first attempt at developing a concept for organic plant breeding methodology has been proposed. A novel approach to breeding for organic production has also been started. Further development needs a parallel approach to animal breeding for organic systems