Legal Responses to Religious Practices in the United States PDF Download
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Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107023688
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
This book questions what practices constitute a "religious activity" such that it cannot be supported or funded by government. It examines the history of accommodating laws when there is tension between respecting religious freedom and maintaining First Amendment requirements that government be neutral.
Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107023688
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
This book questions what practices constitute a "religious activity" such that it cannot be supported or funded by government. It examines the history of accommodating laws when there is tension between respecting religious freedom and maintaining First Amendment requirements that government be neutral.
Author: Andrew Koppelman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674071077
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Although it is often charged with hostility toward religion, First Amendment doctrine in fact treats religion as a distinctive human good. It insists, however, that this good be understood abstractly, without the state taking sides on any theological question. Here, a leading scholar of constitutional law explains the logic of this uniquely American form of neutrality—more religion-centered than liberal theorists propose, and less overtly theistic than conservatives advocate. The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion is under threat. Growing numbers of critics, including a near-majority of the Supreme Court, seem ready to cast aside the ideal of American religious neutrality. Andrew Koppelman defends that ideal and explains why protecting religion from political manipulation is imperative in an America of growing religious diversity. Understanding American religious neutrality, Koppelman shows, can explain some familiar puzzles. How can Bible reading in public schools be impermissible while legislative sessions begin with prayers, Christmas is an official holiday, and the words “under God” appear in the Pledge of Allegiance? Are faith-based social services, public financing of religious schools, or the teaching of intelligent design constitutional? Combining legal, historical, and philosophical analysis, Koppelman shows how law coherently navigates these conundrums. He explains why laws must have a secular legislative purpose, why old, but not new, ceremonial acknowledgments of religion are permitted, and why it is fair to give religion special treatment.
Author: David Sehat
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199793115
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.
Author: United States. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Affirmative action programs
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Author: Sylvie Bacquet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317357310
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
In contemporary pluralist states, where faith communities live together, different religious symbols and practices have to coexist. This may lead to conflicts between certain minority practices and the dominant majority, particularly around the manifestation of belief in the public domain which may be seen both by the religious and secular majorities as a threat to their cultural heritage or against the secular values of the host country. The law has to mitigate those tensions in order to protect the public from harm and preserve order but in doing so, it may where necessary have to limit citizens’ ability to freely manifest their religion. It is those limitations that have been disputed in the courts on grounds of freedom of religion and belief. Religious symbols are often at the heart of legal battles, with courts called upon to consider the lawfulness of banning or restricting certain symbols or practices. This book analyses the relationship between the state, individuals and religious symbols, considering the three main forms of religious expression, symbols that believers wear on their body, symbols in the public space such as religious edifices and rituals that believers perform as a manifestation of their faith. The book looks comparatively at legal responses in England, the U.S.A and France comparing different approaches to the issues of symbols in the public sphere and their interaction with the law. The book considers religious manifestation as a social phenomenon taking a multidisciplinary approach to the question mixing elements of the anthropology, history and sociology of religion in order to provide some context and examine how this could help inform the law.
Author: Kevin Vallier
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190666188
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Religious exemptions have a long history in American law, but have become especially controversial over the last several years. The essays in this volume address the moral and philosophical issues that the legal practice of religious exemptions often raises.
Author: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691180954
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground. Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains. A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution. Featuring a new preface by the author, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society.
Author: Brian Leiter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140085234X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
Why it's wrong to single out religious liberty for special legal protections This provocative book addresses one of the most enduring puzzles in political philosophy and constitutional theory—why is religion singled out for preferential treatment in both law and public discourse? Why are religious obligations that conflict with the law accorded special toleration while other obligations of conscience are not? In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter shows why our reasons for tolerating religion are not specific to religion but apply to all claims of conscience, and why a government committed to liberty of conscience is not required by the principle of toleration to grant exemptions to laws that promote the general welfare.
Author: Peter William Edge
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900448082X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 530
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Book Description
Until recently English law has lacked any specific, generally applicable, guarantees of religious rights. Thus, bodies of law have developed in particular areas where religious interests arise but without a common legal frame. The Human Rights Act 1998, however, has brought the guarantees of the European Convention on Human Rights, most specifically the guarantees of religious rights, non-discrimination, and education rights, more fully into English law. As well as showing how one legal system has engaged with international obligations in respect of religious rights, this text provides a valuable source for comparative study of religious interests in national jurisdictions. It explores the particular response of the English legal system when faced with religious difference, and considers the extent to which the Human Rights Act may produce significant legal change. The text is aimed specifically at both the legal and non-legal reader, and concludes with a discussion of how to use English legal sources, and an extensive bibliography.
Author: Kent Greenawalt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674972201
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Taken as a whole, this statement has the aim of separating church and state, but tensions can emerge between its two elements—the so-called Nonestablishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause—and the values that lie beneath them. If the government controls (or is controlled by) a single church and suppresses other religions, the dominant church’s “establishment” interferes with free exercise. In this respect, the First Amendment’s clauses coalesce to protect freedom of religion. But Kent Greenawalt sets out a variety of situations in which the clauses seem to point in opposite directions. Are ceremonial prayers in government offices a matter of free exercise or a form of establishment? Should the state provide assistance to religious private schools? Should parole boards take prisoners’ religious convictions into account? Should officials act on public reason alone, leaving religious beliefs out of political decisions? In circumstances like these, what counts as appropriate treatment of religion, and what is misguided? When Free Exercise and Nonestablishment Conflict offers an accessible but sophisticated exploration of these conflicts. It explains how disputes have been adjudicated to date and suggests how they might be better resolved in the future. Not only does Greenawalt consider what courts should decide but also how officials and citizens should take the First Amendment’s conflicting values into account.
