Religious Liberty, Volume 2: The Free Exercise Clause (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, Band 2) - Softcover

Laycock, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802865224 ISBN 13: 9780802865229

Verlag: Eerdmans, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

For more than thirty years, Douglas Laycock has been studying, defending, and writing about religious liberty. In this second volume of the comprehensive collection of his writings on the subject, he has compiled articles, amicus briefs, and actual court documents relating to regulatory exemptions under the Constitution, the right to church autonomy, and the rights of non-mainstream religions. This collection - which deals with religious schools and colleges, sex abuse cases, the rights of Hare Krishnas and Scientologists, the landmark decision Employment Division v. Smith, and more - will be a valuable reference for churches, schools, and other religious organizations as they exercise their Constitutionally protected freedom of religion.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Douglas Laycock is Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law and professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. In addition to his work as a lawyer, he has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and numerous other publications.

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RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

By Douglas Laycock

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2011 Douglas Laycock
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6522-9

Contents

Preface to Volume 2.........................................................................................................................xiiIntroduction: The Free Exercise of Religion.................................................................................................xviA. Constitutional Exemptions Before Smith...................................................................................................3B. Constitutional Exemptions After Smith....................................................................................................47A. The General Theory.......................................................................................................................233B. The Rights of Religious Employers........................................................................................................338C. The Rights of Religious Schools and Colleges.............................................................................................421D. The Rights of Religious Counselors.......................................................................................................607E. The Sexual Abuse Cases...................................................................................................................644Amicus Brief in International Society of Krishna Consciousness v. George 499 U.S. 914 (1991) (coauthored)...................................741Amicus Brief in In re WKG, a Minor Child unreported (Tex. App. — Fort Worth 2000) (coauthored)........................................758Amicus Brief in State v. Church of Scientology Flag Service Organization unreported (Fla. Cir. Ct., 2000)...................................776Amicus Brief in Strayhorn v. Ethical Society 110 S.W.3d 458 (Tex. App. — Austin 2003), review denied, (Tex. 2004).....................794Index.......................................................................................................................................807

Chapter One

A. Constitutional Exemptions Before Smith

All the material in this Section was written before the Court's decision in Employment Division v. Smith. It addresses illustrative cases litigated under the pre-Smith regime. There are two amicus briefs and two short articles addressed to religious audiences.

The law before Smith was much better for churches and believers than the law after Smith, but even before Smith these cases were hard to win. Indeed, the religious claimant lost each of the cases in this Section.

The Briefs ...

In Mozert v. Hawkins County Public Schools (1987), parents sought to exempt their children from using a reader that undermined their religious faith.

In Jimmy Swaggart Ministries v. Board of Equalization (1990), Swaggart sought to exempt the sale of religious books and recordings from the California sales and use tax.

Briefs are not hard to read. For a quick guide to their main peculiarity, see the third-to-last paragraph of the Preface to this volume.

... and the Articles

Peyote, Wine, and the First Amendment is an explanation of the issues in Employment Division v. Smith and why Christians should care about those issues, written before the case was decided, when religious liberty scholars all thought it would be decided under then-existing law.

Churches Are Living on Borrowed Time is an interview about the Swaggart case, after it was decided.

Cross References

All the entries in this Section are short. My most substantial scholarly treatment of the exemption issue prior to Smith is in A Survey of Religious Liberty in the United States, in Volume 1.

Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education 827 F.2d 1058 (6th Cir. 1987)

Brief of National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

With my students at The University of Texas Law School

Children are required to attend school, but they are free to attend private schools or home schools instead of public schools. The question in this case was whether that is an all-or-nothing choice. The parents in this case wanted to send their children to public school for most purposes, but home school them in reading, because they believed that the readers assigned in their local schools would undermine their children's religious faith to such an extent that they could not permit their children to read them. They objected to a variety of stories in the readers — from stories of magic, mental telepathy, and other supernatural occurrences at one end to stories with what they understood to be secular humanist themes at the other. Cross-examination led one of the plaintiffs into a series of sweeping claims, and she was widely ridiculed in the press and in the school board's briefs.

Originally the plaintiffs wanted the school to provide an alternate reader for their children, but the trial court refused that remedy. The judge ordered instead that any family that wished could simply opt out of the school's reading class, choosing instead to home school their children in reading. That made the case a simple exemption case. The school was not asked to do anything except leave these children alone with respect to reading.

But the defendant school board and the educational establishment resisted fiercely. They insisted that any student in the public school must take the entire prescribed curriculum, with no exceptions or options except those that the school itself chose to offer. They saw a challenge to their control that would lead to many more such challenges unless it was firmly stamped out. In their view, and in the press, this case was linked to a very different case pending in Alabama at the same time, in which religious parents claimed that the school curriculum had established a religion of secular humanism: Smith v. Board of School Commissioners, 827 F.2d 684 (11th Cir. 1987). The remedy for that would necessarily have been to change the curriculum for all students and to subject the curriculum to judicial control. But the Mozert plaintiffs sought a much simpler and much less intrusive remedy—simply let them opt out of religiously objectionable material, and make up the instruction on their own. Their part-time home schooling would be subject to the same rules and quality controls that the state applied to full-time home schoolers.

This amicus brief was a class project in an experimental seminar on Representing a Major Religious Organization. Pairs of students drafted sections of brief, and I worked closely with each pair, working through strategic and tactical choices and line editing carefully. Despite all that, it still to some extent reflects its origin as a committee project.

Interest of the Amicus Curiae

The National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. is a community of communions composed of thirty-two national religious bodies having over forty million constituents in the United States. It is commonly known as the National Council of Churches. Its public positions are based on policies adopted by its Governing Board, composed of about two hundred fifty-members selected by the member denominations in proportion to their size and support of the Council. The Governing Board has adopted several policy statements affirming religious liberty, including that of minority...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Eerdmans
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802865224
• ISBN 13: 9780802865229
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 872
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland