First Amendment

Misunderstanding the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment

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American Religious Neutrality

‘Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice…  The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.’

So Justice Abraham Fortas declared in delivering …

Roger Sherman’s Reformed Founding

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Roger Sherman

A squirearchy of deists, agnostics, and closeted atheists, the American founders erected a wall of separation between church and state to preserve their fledgling republic from the tyranny of an established church. But debating these points is inconsequential: after all, …

Three Observations About Knox v. SEIU

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          Even for someone outside the world of legal academics, it was an extraordinarily interesting week at the Supreme Court.  I found two of this week’s decisions particularly intriguing.  The one I will discuss in this post, Knox v. SEIU, signals …

The Decline of the Morals Head of the Police Power Under the First Amendment

The Decline of the Morals Head of the Police Power Under the First Amendment

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It is now commonly understood that all areas of constitutional law consist of an uneasy amalgam between explicit constitutional guarantees on the one hand and the implied limitations on those guarantees on the other.  The textual guarantees are extended to …

Responses

The Sacred Rights of Conscience

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The Sacred Rights of Conscience provides students and scholars a rich collection of primary sources that illuminate the discussions and debates about religious liberty in the American founding era. This compilation of primary documents provides a thorough and balanced examination of the evolving relationship between public religion and American culture, from pre-colonial biblical and European sources to the early nineteenth century, to allow the reader to explore the social and political forces that defined the concept of religious liberty and shaped American church-state relations.

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