What a joy to read this magnificent volume, Faith in Law, Law in Faith.I am honored and humbled by this gift and admire and appreciate the deep erudition and generosity of the contributors.These thirty-one elegant chapters are lovely blessings of friendship to cherish.They hold learned insights to ponder.And they attest powerfully to the robust solidarity and fellowship that the international guild of law-and-religion scholars has built across multiple confessions and professions over the past half century.This guild now embraces some fifteen hundred scholars around the globejurists, theologians, historians, ethicists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and other specialists-many of them gathered in some fifty institutes of law and religion on five continents.These diverse scholars are studying the religious dimensions of law, the legal dimensions of religion, and the interaction of legal and religious ideas and institutions, methods and practiceshistorically and today, in the West and well beyond.These scholars believe that, at a fundamental level, religion gives law its spirit and inspires its adherence to ritual, tradition, and justice.Law gives religion its structure and encourages its devotion to order, organization, and orthodoxy.Law and religion share such ideas as fault, obligation, and covenant and such methods as ethics, rhetoric, and hermeneutics.Law and religion also balance each other by counterpoising justice and mercy, rule and equity, discipline and love.It is this dialectical interaction that gives these two disciplines and two dimensions of life their vitality and their strength.Without law at its backbone, religion slowly crumbles into shallow spiritualism.Without religion at its heart, law gradually crumbles into empty, and sometimes brutal, formalism.This is the field of interdisciplinary study that I have had the privilege of working in for the past forty plus years.In college, my charismatic philosophy professor H. Evan Runner taught me to look for the religious sources and commitments implicit or explicit in historical and modern ideas and institutions, including those of law, politics, and society.My great law school mentor and later longstanding colleague, Harold J. Berman, taught me to map the shifting belief systems at the heart of the evolution and revolutions of the Western legal tradition.

Journal Article Religion in Schools: Learning Lessons from Wales. By Russell Sandberg Get access Religion in Schools: Learning Lessons from Wales. By Russell Sandberg. London: Anthem Press, 2022. 134 pp. $24.95 eBook. John Witte John Witte Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA E-mail: jwitte@law.emory.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 65, Issue 4, Winter 2023, Pages 474–475, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csad058 Published: 28 November 2023

Abstract This chapter presents the basic structure of religious exercise cases in American law. It reviews the procedural features of, and the jurisdictional requirements for, such cases and it provides a clear classification of their types, organized both by factual clusters and time periods. In addition, this chapter introduces the different and evolving standards of review and doctrinal tests that the Supreme Court has used when evaluating religious liberty claims and deciding free exercise cases. The distinctions between low-level, rational basis scrutiny; intermediate or heightened scrutiny; and high-level or strict scrutiny standards are set out and illustrated. This chapter provides essential background for the two subsequent chapters (Chapters 6 and 7), which describe and carefully evaluate the entire body of the Court’s free exercise jurisprudence up to the present.

Abstract This chapter summarizes the four major views on religious freedom that dominated the eighteenth-century American founding era. We label these views Puritan, Evangelical, Enlightenment, and Civic Republican. Exponents of these four positions often found common cause and used common language, particularly during the constitutional convention and ratification debates from 1776 to 1791. Yet each group offered its own distinct teachings on religious freedom and had its own preferences for how to implement religious freedom in state and federal laws. Together, these groups held up the four corners of a wide canopy of opinions about religious freedom in eighteenth-century American. The founders’ original intent or understanding of religious freedom cannot be reduced to any one of these four views. It must be sought in the tensions among them and in the general principles of religious freedom that emerged from their interaction.

This chapter and the one that follows (Chapter 10) discuss the Supreme Court’s cases addressing the intersection of religion and education. This chapter focuses on public education. It addresses the case law concerning prayer and moments of silence in schools and school-related activities, Bible reading during school hours, religious expression by students and teachers, and the teaching of creationism and evolution. It addresses the Court’s diverging approaches, from “separation” of religion and education to, more recently, an approach that ensures equal access for religious actors and activities to public facilities, forums, and funds. While there are clear limits to governmental promotion of religion in public schools, recent cases also make clear that private religious expression may not be excluded as such or discriminated against and that religious actors enjoy equal access rights.

This chapter provides a concise account of the basic procedural and other features of cases involving the First Amendment’s establishment clause. It carefully reviews the clause’s text and describes the various justiciability and other doctrines, including “standing,” that govern the resolution of such cases. The chapter introduces and reviews the variety of approaches the Supreme Court has taken when resolving different factual categories of cases. These approaches include separationism, accommodationism, neutrality, endorsement, coercion, equal treatment, and tradition. This chapter sets up the subsequent three chapters (Chapters 9, 10, and 11) by previewing the evolution and development of the Court’s doctrines in a range of factual contexts.

Abstract This chapter reviews the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause cases involving religious ceremonies, arguments, expression, and symbols in public life and in the public square. It reviews the cases on legislative prayer and the public employment of legislative chaplains. It next surveys cases involving displays of religious symbols, such as a creche, cross, menorah, or the Ten Commandments, on public property. The chapter shows the role that history and tradition play in evaluating, and protecting, certain practices even if they involve religious symbols. The chapter concludes by providing a crisp assessment of patterns and principles to assist in making sense of religious symbols cases, which have at times seemed conflicting. Finally, the chapter provides a summary and conclusions on the Court’s establishment clause cases and thus ties together the previous two chapters (Chapters 9 and 10 with this one.

Subject Religious Studies Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

This chapter explores the issues that arise when governments cooperate with religious schools or support parental choice in education. In its early cases, the Court affirmed a logic of accommodation and protected religious schools and parents’ rights in education. However, as this chapter describes, the Court made an abrupt turn in 1970s, and was often skeptical of public support for, and cooperation with, religious schools, even when this cooperation was aimed at assisting vulnerable and needy children. More recently, though, the Court has developed an equality logic and affirmed that religious schools may be - and sometimes must be - treated equally with nonreligious schools. This equal-treatment approach has been illustrated in cases involving scholarship and "voucher" programs, and in some cases involving direct aid to religious schools.

Abstract This chapter explores the role and religious freedom rights of religious organizations and institutions, including schools, hospitals, and social-welfare agencies. It explains the fundamental principle of religious liberty that religious organizations retain the rights to govern themselves, select their own leaders, and resolve their own disputes. An important, long line of cases describes principles that govern religious property disputes - which permits the use of neutral principles of law by courts, but still insists that matters touching upon religion must be decided by the religious organization, not the secular courts or civil authorities. The chapter also explores an important set of cases regarding labor, employment, and discrimination, including the 2012 Hosanna-Tabor case, which hold that religious organizations (including religious schools) are exempt from certain non-discrimination requirements. Finally, it explores other areas of intersection between the government and religious organizations, such as the regulation of social services and taxation.

This chapter presents the basic structure of religious exercise cases in American law. It reviews the procedural features of, and the jurisdictional requirements for, such cases and it provides a clear classification of their types, organized both by factual clusters and time periods. In addition, this chapter introduces the different and evolving standards of review and doctrinal tests that the Supreme Court has used when evaluating religious liberty claims and deciding free exercise cases. The distinctions between low-level, rational basis scrutiny; intermediate or heightened scrutiny; and high-level or strict scrutiny standards are set out and illustrated. This chapter provides essential background for the two subsequent chapters (Chapters 6 and 7), which describe and carefully evaluate the entire body of the Court’s free exercise jurisprudence up to the present.

This chapter analyzes the development of church-state relations during the Roman Empire, the Papal Revolutionary and medieval period, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment. It traces the gradual and contested emergence of fundamental principles of liberty of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, and separation of church and state. It also portrays the dominant pattern of state establishments of religion – the idea, introduced in the fourth century, that only a single form of Christianity should be allowed in each political community, supported and enforced by the state, with all other faiths either banned as heretical or, at best, tolerated. These ideas of religious freedom and religious establishment were transmitted from Europe to colonial New England and American colonies in the south. But the 17th and 18th centuries also saw the first constitutional experiments, in colonial Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, of disestablishing religion and granting religious freedom to all peaceable religions.

This text is drawn from the front matter of the fifth edition of Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (2022). This volume is a standard classroom text that serves as an introduction for students, a provocation for specialists, and an invitation for the public to view afresh the American experiment in religious freedom. We combine historical, legal, and theoretical analysis to tell the unique American story of religious freedom—from the adoption of the First Amendment in 1791 to the Supreme Court’s most recent interpretations of its guarantees of no establishment and free exercise of religion. We present just enough analysis of the texts and contexts of the American founding era for readers to appreciate the ingenuity of the First Amendment. We analyze and organize the Supreme Court’s complex and shifting case law in a way that readers can witness the intricacies and patterns of the American constitutional law of religious freedom in action. And we propose an argument for the principled integration of religious liberty so readers can see the robust promise that the American experiment still holds. This excerpt provides an overview of the book’s argument, and sketches four eras of Supreme Court case law on religious freedom, including a dawning fourth era with the Court providing new robust protection for religious freedom.

This chapter reviews the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause cases involving religious ceremonies, arguments, expression, and symbols in public life and in the public square. It reviews the cases on legislative prayer and the public employment of legislative chaplains. It next surveys cases involving displays of religious symbols, such as a creche, cross, menorah, or the Ten Commandments, on public property. The chapter shows the role that history and tradition play in evaluating, and protecting, certain practices even if they involve religious symbols. The chapter concludes by providing a crisp assessment of patterns and principles to assist in making sense of religious symbols cases, which have at times seemed conflicting. Finally, the chapter provides a summary and conclusions on the Court’s establishment clause cases and thus ties together the previous two chapters (Chapters 9 and 10 with this one.

Abstract This chapter reviews the Supreme Court’s free exercise decisions and doctrines from its 1990 ruling in Employment Division v. Smith until the present. The Court moved away from a pro-exemption position to one that emphasized government neutrality and, in 1990, ruled that religious objectors are not constitutionally entitled to judicially created exemptions. Almost immediately, however, the Court emphasized that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause does not permit discrimination on the basis of religion, and this prohibition has increasingly been treated by the Court as a requirement that regulations must be carefully reviewed. Recent cases involving funding for religious schools, public-health restrictions on religious gatherings, and conflicts between antidiscrimination law and religious freedom rights are presented. Also discussed is the continuing application of a strict scrutiny standard of review under state and federal statutes, including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

This chapter traces the actions on religion and religious freedom in the Continental Congress (1774-1789), the United States Constitutional Convention and ratification debates (1787-1789), the First Congress (1789), and the ratification debates over the Bill of Rights that followed. The chapter parses in detail what each of these national bodies said about religious freedom in the surviving records, analyzes each of the 25 drafts of the religion clauses crafted between 1787 and 1789 and the surviving debates about them, and then analyzes what is clear and not so clear in the final words of the First Amendment that were ratified in 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

This chapter considers the Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, beginning with the late nineteenth century cases relating to the persecution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It reviews the development of the Court’s doctrines relating to government actions that discriminate on the basis of religion and claims by religious believers to exemptions from generally applicable laws that burden religious exercise. These cases include those dealing with conscientious objections to conscription, regulations of religious expression, compelled professions of political allegiance, and the application of the First Amendment’s principles to state and local governments. This chapter includes the Court’s embrace of a strict scrutiny standard for neutral laws that burden religious exercise and the high-water mark for religious exemptions in the cases of Sherbert v. Verner (1963), which protected a Saturday Sabbatarian claim, and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which protected the rights of Amish parents to educate their children in accord with their communities’ religious commitments.

This chapter distils the six main interlinking principles of religious freedom collectively embraced by the eighteenth-century American founders – liberty of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, religious equality, separation of church and state, and disestablishment of (at least a national) religion. It shows the different and sometimes competing logics that the founders used to support these principles, and the expression and application of these principles in the new state constitutions of the 1770s and 1780s. The chapter traces the roots and routes of these religious freedom principles in the earlier Western legal tradition, but also shows how the principles of religious equality for all peaceable faiths and no establishment of any religion by law were largely new creations and distinctive features of the American constitutional experiment.

Until its abolition in 2008, the law on blasphemy was perhaps the clearest example of what I have previously attempted to style as English religion law: that is, a piece of state law that regulates religion. Following the abolition of the offence of blasphemy, it has commonly been assumed that there is less to say about the interaction between religion and criminal law. With the exception of some discussion of the law on religious aggravated offences and the offence of stirring up religious hatred, criminal law textbooks and other writings in that field tend to refer to religion even less than they once did. Yet, as this groundbreaking new edited collection ably demonstrates, there remains much more to say and to interrogate about criminal law and religion. This volume also brings together two seminal developments in law and religion studies that have occurred in recent years. The first is that a series of important volumes have been published by John Witte Jr and his Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University on law and Christianity, providing introductions to interactions between Christianity and the law on various topics such as human rights, family law and natural law. These have previously been published by Cambridge University Press but with this volume the series moves to Routledge and unites with a second seminal series in law and religion scholarship: the Law and Religion series led by Norman Doe of the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff. This book demonstrates that Cambridge’s loss is clearly Routledge’s gain. As befitting a volume that unites these two significant series, the book is edited by four outstanding scholars on law and religion. Seeing the four names of Hill, Doe, Helmholz and Witte on one spine tells you everything you need to know about the importance and quality of this volume. The contents of the volume do not disappoint. After a preface by Lord Judge and an introduction by Mark Hill QC, the book falls into four parts. The first provides a welcome and rich account of the historical contributions of Christianity and criminal law. This includes discussion of criminal law in the Old Testament and in early Christianity, as well as a chapter on crime and the canon law by Richard Helmholz that is likely to become the definitive primer on the topic. The part (2022) 24 Ecc LJ 101–111 © Ecclesiastical Law Society, 2021