Harvard Law & Policy Review

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Religious Freedom and (Other) Civil Liberties: Is There a Middle Ground?

To mark the release of Volume 9.1, Notice & Comment will be highlighting each of the articles in its own blog post. Today’s featured article: Professor Abner S. Greene's Religious Freedom and (Other) Civil Liberties: Is There a Middle Ground? Professor Greene, who is the Leonard F. Manning Professor at Fordham Law School, writes: The question will always be in the details: How do we evaluate the need for uniform enforcement versus the need for accommodation? To insist on one or the other …

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The Satanic Temple, Scott Walker, and Contraception: A Partial Account of Hobby Lobby’s Implications for State Law

To mark the release of Volume 9.1, Notice & Comment will be highlighting each of the articles in its own blog post. Today’s featured article: Kara Loewentheil's The Satanic Temple, Scott Walker, and Contraception: A Partial Account of Hobby Lobby’s Implications for State Law. Ms. Loewentheil, a Research Fellow and Director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience at Columbia Law School, discusses the extreme interpretations of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision that appeared in the …

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Dangerous Precedents in Hobby Lobby

by Noah Marks Yesterday morning, the Supreme Court decided Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding 5-4 that religious owners of closely-held corporations are exempt from the contraception coverage requirement of the Affordable Care Act based on the 1993 Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. Writing for the majority, Justice Alito strains to emphasize the limited scope of the decision, claiming that it applies only to closely held companies, only to contraception, and only to this preexisting …

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Free Exercise Clause Protection for Junk Science

By Tom Watts Today, the Supreme Court decided Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. In this post, I examine an issue that the Court passed over: whether Hobby Lobby’s belief is actually religious. The Court presumed so, but their presumption was incorrect, and the issue is dispositive. This makes the Court’s decision wrong. The First Amendment protects religious freedom, but it does not provide protection to non-religious beliefs. As the Supreme Court observed in Wisconsin v. Yoder (a case that RFRA …

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