- Litigating the boundaries of religious liberty: Tunku Varadarajan interview/profile with Becket Fund’s Montse Alvarado [WSJ] And mark your calendar for Sept. 28, Cato’s inaugural day-long conference “The Future of the First Amendment” at which I’ll be on a panel on religious liberty;
- What Hamilton wrote: archive find casts further doubt on theory President isn’t “officer” subject to Emoluments Clause [Brianne Gorod, Take Care] Broad definition of emoluments in suit against Trump might trip up its own lead plaintiff, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal [Michael Stern] “There is nothing wrong with Justice Gorsuch speaking at the luncheon despite its venue.” [Steve Lubet on Trump-Hotel-as-speech-venue flap]
- Duties of celebration: Cato amicus urges SCOTUS to consolidate Arlene’s Florist with Masterpiece Cakeshop case [Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald]
- Maryland gun ban unconstitutionally broad, argue Randy Barnett and Dave Kopel in Cato amicus [Shapiro, Kopel, and Matthew Larosiere] Restore rights to a rehabilitated felon? Sure, says Maryland, but not gun rights. Constitutional check [Shapiro]
- Federalist Society’s annual Supreme Court roundup speech for last term, by Miguel Estrada, is now online. Unfinished business: 10 certiorari petitions from last term SCOTUS justices should have granted [Mark Chenoweth, WLF] And don’t forget to mark your calendar for Cato’s Constitution Day Sept. 18;
- By 2019, constitutional law discussions at America’s top law schools were being conducted entirely in emoji [@tribelaw on Twitter on “First or Second Amendment, pick one” question of whether persons assembling for political protest have right to bear arms at the same time]
Posts Tagged ‘religious liberty’
July 19 roundup
- “Biometric Privacy Laws: How a Little-Known Illinois Law Made Facebook Illegal” [Jane Bambauer]
- Organized dentists work to block legal recognition of independent dental therapist practices [Mary Jordan, Washington Post]
- Some yearn to bring back Warren Court (or even more interventionist) antitrust doctrine. Just don’t [John McGinnis]
- “O’Neil is the Wang of Ireland” says apparel trademark disputant [Timothy Geigner, Techdirt]
- “Religious people should live under the same laws as everyone else” was a nice slogan while it lasted [Julie Zauzmer, Washington Post on nuns’ construction of chapel in field so as to block pipeline, plus resulting Twitter thread]
- “Therapy animals are everywhere, but proof that they help is not” [Karin Brulliard, Chicago Tribune]
July 12 roundup
- Mother who gives 10 year old the run of a Lego store: Mom of the Year, or candidate for arrest? [Lenore Skenazy on Ontario County, N.Y. incident]
- Sorry to see WSJ Law Blog close. A wealth of valuable content, often first on stories, showcase for rising writers [farewell post]
- Oops! “The bill as [passed] …allows a pregnant woman to commit homicide without consequences.” [Lowering the Bar on New Hampshire measure]
- No, a court really didn’t overturn Florida stand-your-ground law. Let Eugene Volokh explain [Volokh Conspiracy] Still, the recently enacted procedural fillip the court did strike down was one of practical significance to many defendants [C.J. Ciaramella, Reason]
- In the mail: John Corvino et al., Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination. Good opening essay [Oxford University Press]
- What one bad lawyer can do: feds chase $600 million in disability claims linked to fugitive Eric Conn [Chris Edwards, Cato]
Supreme Court will hear cakeshop case
By agreeing to hear the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court has set up a potentially major decision on “whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel the petitioner to create expression that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the free speech or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. My link-rich Cato post also goes on to discuss the sleeper case of Pavan v. Smith, which offers a glimpse of how a post-Scalia conservative wing may address issues following in the wake of Obergefell.
P.S. More from Erica Goldberg on the hubbub over Gorsuch’s dissent in Pavan.
On religious liberty, a less than overwhelming executive order
I’ve got an op-ed at the New York Daily News about President Trump’s executive order taking a few generally small and measured steps toward accommodation of and favorable legal treatment toward religious belief. Excerpt:
On Wednesday, social media was filled with outcry about the sweeping, “Handmaid’s Tale”-like provisions of the executive order on religious liberty President Trump was preparing to sign Thursday….
What the White House unveiled Wednesday night was far more modest. In fact, it dropped about 96% of the controversial stuff that had circulated in the January draft, including many provisions that in my view were misconceived …
There is also [in the tax section of the order] a cryptic reference to having agencies defer more broadly to speech rights beyond the context of the IRS and campaigns, which lawyers are likely to look at closely in coming days just in case it proves to be something big….
Significantly, according to advance reports, a White House official indicates that there are no plans for any additional executive order on LGBT discrimination issues.
Organized gay groups, committed to keeping their base in a constant state of alarm, will be reluctant to admit that this is a big win for their cause.
More: Ilya Shapiro at Cato, Ed Morrissey, and my post on the earlier draft.
Claim: church’s rule against breast-feeding in the pews violates Virginia law
In 2015, following the lead of many other states, Virginia passed a “law that says women have a right to breast-feed anywhere they have a legal right to be.” The law provides “no exemption for religious institutions.” Now a mother and her attorney say Summit Church in Springfield, in the D.C. suburbs, had no right to ask her to use a private room to feed her baby during a service.
Personally, I’m fine with public breast-feeding no longer being categorized, as it once was, as an automatically shocking thing. But why is government dictation of how a church may arrange its rules for worship no longer categorized as an automatically shocking thing? [Michael Alison Chandler and Laura Vozzella, Washington Post] [adapted and cross-posted at Cato at Liberty; and welcome Mosaic Magazine readers]
Free speech loses a round Down Under, 18C unchanged for now
In a defeat for free expression in Australia, the country’s Senate has rejected the Turnbull government’s proposal to soften elements of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which bans so-called hate speech based on race [The Guardian, ABC] Opposition to the change was led by the opposition Labor Party, whose spokesman for multicultural affairs, Tony Burke, said “Any change that results in more permission being given for racial hate speech is bad for Australia.” In 2011, an Australian federal court found commentator Andrew Bolt guilty under the law over remarks in which he is said to have implied that some fair-skinned persons of part-aboriginal descent elect to classify themselves as aboriginal for career advancement.
By coincidence — although not really so, if you see what I mean — a planned lecture tour of Australia by AEI’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a vocal critic of female genital mutilation, sharia law, and jihadism, has been called off following calls to venues and insurers threatening “trouble.” Ali, who was born Muslim but came to disagree with the religious tenets of Islam, already travels with armed guards because of the credible threat of assassination [Kay Hymowitz, City Journal]
Report: USDA inspectors wrote up meat packing owner over pamphlets in breakroom
According to reports last month in the religious press, the owner of a small meat-packing operation in western Michigan left some pamphlets around in the breakroom reflecting his views on same-sex marriage (opposed) and got written up for it by inspectors with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose duties, it seems, include spotting and demanding prompt rectification of hostile-environment harassment, in this case consisting of the printed word. [Reformed Free Publishing Association, Gene Veith] And Stephanie Slade of Reason has a big essay on religious liberty, in which I’m quoted, in Jesuit magazine America.
February 22 roundup
- “Freedom of Association Takes Another Hit” as Washington high court rules against florist Barronelle Stutzman [Roger Pilon, Ilya Shapiro, earlier]
- Aside from chipping away at the rule of law, job preservation via presidential threats may not work well as an economic development strategy [David Henderson]
- NYC cops shot burglar in rear end and now he wants $10 million over that [New York Post]
- Granting certiorari in Blackman v. Gascho case would allow Supreme Court to tackle fee abuses in class actions [Ted Frank, Daniel Fisher, earlier]
- Will competing versions be introduced of FADA, the religious-exemption First Amendment Defense Act? [Jessica Yarvin/PBS, I’m quoted; my take on the first introduced version of the bill]
- I talked Sunday with Maryland-based blog radio hosts Ryan Miner and Eric Beasley on topics that included the Gorsuch nomination, Chevron deference, doctor-assisted suicide, and redistricting reform [BlogTalkRadio, one of my longer audio interviews at 1:12:00]
Discrimination law roundup
- Prof. Sam Estreicher proposes safe-harbor rule to overcome disincentives to hiring of costly or risky job seekers [SSRN via Workplace Prof]
- “Muslim flight attendant for ExpressJet suspended, wouldn’t serve alcohol” [Detroit Free Press, earlier]
- Profile of lawyer Joel Liberson, who’s talked many cities into suing banks for big bucks under Fair Housing Act [WSJ]
- “Did the 7th Circuit finally kill McDonnell-Douglas?” [Jon Hyman on “burden-shifting” evidentiary framework in employment discrimination law]
- U.S. Commission on Civil Rights believes law should defer to religious conscience claims “only to the extent that they do not unduly burden” bans on discrimination [Stephanie Slade, Reason; report with nonpartisan sections written by Lenore Ostrowsky] Anti-discrimination laws as applied to private actors restrict liberty and sometimes force conscience [David Harsanyi, The Federalist] “Massachusetts: Churches may be covered by transgender discrimination bans, as to ‘secular events'” [Volokh]
- “Unfair ‘Fair Housing’: The new Obama administration policy to ‘deconcentrate’ poverty is a threat to communities” [Howard Husock, City Journal; Kurtz, NRO]