In this post, I speculated about the possibility that the meaning of "establishment" might be illuminated by the English experience of the term before the Constitution's drafting. The idea would be to understand "establishment" not by reference to a fixed meaning traceable to the founding, but instead by reference to a general, but not limitless, range of meanings in use as a matter of the common law experience antedating the Constitution. That range might have a core and a periphery, and while the periphery, it is true, might change over time, any changes would be very gradual and always intimately connected with the historical common law meanings of establishment.
Our Center board member and my friend, Don Drakeman, helpfully points me to a different kind of common law evidence--uses of the term establishment in state courts after ratification of the Constitution. He argues that a shift was occurring in the meaning of the term during this period: from a narrow meaning limited to what Thomas Curry has called a meaning “modeled on the Anglican establishment in England,” to a broader meaning covering the issue of general assessments for funding churches. The former meaning would suggest a “sect preference” approach to the issue of establishment, while the latter would not.
In his book, Church, State, and Original Intent (at pages 216-229), Don describes the different post-First Amendment views in Massachusetts and New Hampshire circa 1800 about the meaning of establishment as expressed in three court cases—Avery v. Tyringham (1807), Barnes v. Falmouth (1810), and Muzzy v. Wilkins (1803).
Tyringham concerned Article III of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, the preamble of which at that time stated that “the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality; and [that] these cannot generally be diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality.” Based on that rationale, the Massachusetts Constitution goes on to authorize towns “to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of GOD, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality.” But Article III also provided that “no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law.” The opinion of Justice Theodore Sedgwick (who also served as a member of the First Congress that adopted the Establishment Clause) concluded that in these “strong and energetic” provisions “the religion of Protestant Christianity is established. Liberty of conscience is secured.” (emphasis in original) That interpretation suggests that the sort of explicit public support for Protestant Christianity contemplated by the Massachusetts Constitution does constitute an establishment, even though Massachusetts never had an expressly authorized or designated official church establishment.
In a later Massachusetts case, Barnes v. Falmouth (1810), Justice Theophilus Parsons considered whether the minister of an unincorporated church could share in taxes raised under Article III. Justice Parsons wrote that the case provided an occasion to “consider the motives which induced this people to introduce into the constitution a religious establishment, the nature of the establishment introduced, and the rights and privileges it secured to the people, and to their teachers.” Here is Don’s description of the opinion:
According to Chief Justice Parsons, the rationale for an establishment is based on the fact that “[c]ivil government…availing itself only of its own powers, is extremely defective”; accordingly, “the people of Massachusetts…adopted and patronized a religion, which by its benign and energetic influences, might cooperate with human institutions, to promote and secure the happiness of its citizens.” Fortunately, he writes, “the people were not exposed to the hazard of choosing a false and defective religious system. Christianity had long been promulgated, its pretensions and excellences well known, and its divine authority admitted.” In particular, “This religion, as understood by Protestants, tending, by its effects, to make every man…a better husband, parent, child, neighbor, citizen, and magistrate, was by the people established as a fundamental and essential part of their constitution.” Pointing out that there is “liberty of conscience” for all, “whether Protestant or Catholic, Jew, Mahometan or Pagan, the constitution then provides for the public teaching of the precepts and maxims of the religion of Protestant Christians to all the people.” It is, therefore, “the right and duty of all corporate religious societies, to elect and support a public Protestant teacher of piety, religion, and morality.” Unincorporated churches could not share in taxes raised under Article III, concluded Parsons; otherwise, which teacher to be supported depends “exclusively on the will of a majority of each society incorporated for these purposes.”
221-222. Don argues that Justice Parsons’s description of this arrangement as an “establishment” shows that some Massachusetts jurists believed that the town-by-town assessments for Protestant teachers were themselves believed to be establishments. It is an interesting question whether the assessments themselves, or instead the assessments only as part of the general, if unofficial, privileging of Protestant Christianity as the civic religion, is really what Justices Parsons and Sedgwick are describing as an “establishment.” The latter possibility might narrow the meaning of establishment somewhat: the privileging of Protestant Christianity by all of the means described by these Justices in the Massachusetts Constitution—including the assessment scheme—comes perhaps closer to the meaning of establishment as “official” privileging than does a meaning which considers assessments favoring religion alone as an establishment.
A third piece of evidence can be found right over the border among some Justices in New Hampshire, where, Don writes, “at about the same time, a distinguished jurist who was a member of the Second through the Fifth Federal Congresses made a point of saying that the Granite State’s town-based general assessment tax system for the support of Protestant ministers, which was quite similar to the Massachusetts approach, was clearly not an establishment of religion.” 223
The issue arose in the 1803 case of Muzzy v. Wilkins, where Chief Justice Jeremiah Smith “considered whether a Presbyterian was entitled to an exemption from the town taxes in support of the Congregational church under New Hampshire’s constitution, which empowered the legislature to authorize the towns of the state to make provision for public protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality.” According to Chief Justice Smith, the assessment system alone did not constitute an establishment: “No one sect is invested with any political power much less with a monopoly of civil privileges and civil offices. All denominations are equally under the protection of the law, are equally the objects of its favor and regard.”
Chief Justice Smith’s is that rare opinion where a judge actually provides a definition of an “establishment”: “A religious establishment is where the State prescribes a formulary of faith and worship for the rule and governance of all the subjects.”
This definition, it is true, is narrower than what can be discerned from the general approach in the two Massachusetts decisions. But New Hampshire’s state constitution at the time did not (so far as I know) contain the sort of language unofficially, but quite explicitly, privileging Protestant Christianity as was the case in Massachusetts. It might be that it was this general privileging (even if unofficial, and to include, in Massachusetts, state assessments) that was thought by both Massachusetts and New Hampshire jurists to constitute “establishment.”
At any rate, it would be worthwhile, as well as interesting, to explore the range of common law meanings of establishment before ratification of the First Amendment as well. As Don says in the book, it would probably be impossible to arrive at a single fixed meaning. But it might well be possible to reach consensus about a general range or spectrum of meanings, with core or uncontested meanings graduating outward toward peripheral or contested ones.
Dahlia Lithwick has written a column with a very odd fundamental claim:
[H]aving covered the Court for 15 years, I’ve come to believe that what we’re seeing goes beyond ideology. Because ideology alone would not propel the justices to effect such massive shifts upon the constitutional landscape, inventing rights for corporations while gutting protections for women, minorities, and workers. No, the real problem, I think, is that the Court as a whole has gotten too smart for our own good....
The result has been what Professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School calls the “Judicialization of the Judiciary,” a selection process that discourages political or advocacy experience and reduces the path to the Supreme Court to a funnel: elite schools beget elite judicial clerkships beget elite federal judgeships. Rinse, repeat. All nine sitting justices attended either Yale or Harvard law schools. (Ginsburg started her studies in Cambridge but graduated from Columbia.) Eight once sat on a federal appellate court; five have done stints as full-time law school professors. There is not a single justice “from the heartland,” as Clarence Thomas has complained....
A Supreme Court built this way is going to have blind spots. But right-wing legal and political groups—who are much better at the confirmation game than their equivalents on the left—have added a final criteria that ensures the Court leans strongly in their favor. They have succeeded in setting the definition of the consummate judge: a humble, objective, nearly mechanical umpire who merely calls “balls and strikes,” in Roberts’s insincere but politically deft phrasing. This lets conservatives sell nominees who are far more conservative than liberal nominees are liberal. A Democratic-appointed justice makes the short list by having her heart in the right place, but will be disqualified for heeding it too much.
Lithwick is hardly the first to observe that the Justices all attended elite law schools or that the Court is "cloistered" by comparison with past Supreme Courts. A majority of the members of the current Court--5--were, as Lithwick notes, for a time professors and deans at such law schools.
I'll make Lithwick a deal: in about 10 years' time (right about the time where we might, perhaps, be getting some retirements, that is), we'll all--left, right and center--make a concerted effort to get some lawyers "from the heartland" nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Or we'll do that for "war veterans," a category of Justice that Lithwick says she'd like to see on the Court. Or perhaps we'll just do it for lawyers from non-elite schools--solid, strong schools like St. John's University School of Law, with the kind of smart and highly capable lawyers whom I am privileged to teach (including in Constitutional Law!), and who have rich and rewarding lives in legal practice of various kinds. We could call it "the Progressive Court-Packing Plan" or "the Heart-Is-In-The-Right-Place Plan" or "the Real Life Plan." The cardinal rule of the Real Life Plan Deal is: no graduates of elite law schools; and absolutely, positively, never, ever, ever any law school professors.
Unlike Lithwick, I'm quite unsure just what sort of ideological mix we'd get on the Court by following the Real Life Plan. But I'll take that bet.
Friday, November 14, 2014
The latest issue of the Harvard Law Review contains an extensive appreciation of a selection of Justice Breyer's opinions. I thought to note one essay as particularly well done: Professor Richard Fallon's discussion of Justice Breyer's decisive concurrence in Van Orden v. Perry--one of two companion Ten Commandments decisions issued by the Court in 2005. In that concurrence, Justice Breyer decided for a variety of reasons that, he said, defied codification by test or iron rule, that the monument that had stood for many years on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol did not violate the Establishment Clause. Here is Professor Fallon (footnotes omitted):
Justice Breyer’s third ground for distinguishing prior cases, and especially McCreary County, seems to me to cut to the heart of the dilemma that the Supreme Court confronted. Even if the Texas monument’s long history did not dilute its religious message, that history served as a reminder that the Establishment Clause — read against the background of history — cannot, as Justice Breyer put it, “compel the government to purge from the public sphere all that in any way partakes of the religious.” From the beginning, religion has been woven in various ways into American public life. Recognition of this heritage does not, of course, point directly to the correct ruling in Van Orden. It does, however, help to identify the tension that Van Orden required the Court to resolve, or at least manage. Although the Supreme Court has frequently articulated a demand that the government must be neutral in matters of religion, neither that demand, nor what Justice Breyer referred to as the “Court’s other tests,” can “readily explain the Establishment Clause’s tolerance, for example, of the prayers that open legislative meetings; certain references to, and invocations of, the Deity in the public words of public officials; the public references to God on coins, decrees, and buildings; or the attention paid to the religious objectives of certain holidays, including Thanksgiving.”
Without purporting to offer a comprehensive resolution to the tension that the Court’s cases exhibit, Justice Breyer’s Van Orden concurrence suggests a narrow prescription that embodies pragmatic good sense. Although modern governments may not initiate novel forms of support for religious institutions and beliefs, the Establishment Clause should not be read to mandate the chiseling out — which in some cases might be quite literal — of all religious symbols and practices that have long formed part of the architecture of American public life, American public buildings, and American public monuments. To read the Clause so stringently would provoke anger at and resentment of the Supreme Court’s perceived hostility to religion far disproportionate to any good that this approach would achieve....
There is more, and it's well-worth reading. I, too, admire Justice Breyer's Van Orden concurrence, but while my reasons are similar to Professor Fallon's, they are not identical. Perhaps the primary point of divergence in our perspectives is that my defense of historical settlements and practices as a guide to interpreting the meaning of the religion clauses does not depend either on judges' pragmatic calculations about the comparative social divisiveness of ruling this way or that, or on an overarching or master commitment to religious neutrality, but instead on the intrinsic worth of long-standing historical settlements and customs (doctrinal and social) as a method of conciliating the conflicts that attend these controversies:
The past lies in us and is constitutive of who we are, and though history may be epistemically uncertain, logical certitude is hardly the point of a theory of religious liberty. This point serves as the connection to social history. If the doctrinal negotiations of the past are worthy, though imperfect, counselors for the predicaments of the present--if they are that which we know, and their memory is that which we have--then the objects of those negotiations deserve our attention as well. Political communities are not a-temporal or static associations. They are trans-generational enterprises that depend on the transmission of political and social histories....
The past, in sum, is a beacon. It is a consolation, sometimes effective, other times not, against the ravages of conflict, incommensurability, sacrifice, and tragic loss.
The Tragedy of Religious Freedom 123, 144.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Professor Michael Rappaport has a really neat post about common law rights that are constitutionalized, and how one should interpret such rights. The post is particularly interesting for me because in my constitutional theory seminar, we are in between two classes that consider, respectively, the role of tradition and historical practice in constitutional interpretation, and the relationship between precedent and interpretive theory. But as Professor James Stoner has shown, there are many textual features of the Constitution that use terms rooted in common law understandings. What are the interpretive possibilities in such cases; what happens to a common law right that has been constitutionalized? Rappaport sets out 3 options:
1. Static: When the common law right is constitutionalized, it becomes fully frozen, as if it were written law. To determine the meaning of the right, one looks to the common law in 1789. The existing decisions regarding the common law constitute the full meaning of the right.
2. Dynamic: Although the common law right was written into the Constitution, it did not change its character. Instead, it remains as flexible as a common law right. Under this interpretation, one might see something like the living constitution view in the Constitution.
3. Intermediate: When the common law right was constitutionalized, it changed its character, but it did not become fully frozen as if it were written law. Under this view, one treats the right as a common law right as of the time it was enacted, but does not give it a dynamic effect with changing circumstances.
It is not surprising that Professor Rappaport ends up opting for choice #3, because this choice maps fairly neatly onto his general interpretive defense (with Professor John McGinnis) of original methods originalism! See the post for his reasons. What is of special interest to me is the extent to which the Constitution depends upon common law terminology and common law ideas. For this, you really can't do better than Professor Stoner's work. But I suspect there is much more to be done in that area. In fact, sometimes I wonder whether anybody has ever reviewed the English experience with the term "establishment of religion" in the centuries before the Constitution's drafting (surely someone has).
Saturday, October 25, 2014
John Gray has a long, superb essay on the subject (h/t L. Joseph), with scathingly acute criticisms of the modern sense in which evil is eminently conquerable through (of all things) politics, or really doesn’t exist, or must somehow be the result of somebody’s mistake, or could be cleared up as a simple matter confusion. Particularly keen are Gray’s comments about the way in which the old religious traditions offer certain insights on the matter, insights that are today largely either ignored or disbelieved. Read it all, including this:
It’s not that [most western leaders] are obsessed with evil. Rather, they don’t really believe in evil as an enduring reality in human life. If their feverish rhetoric means anything, it is that evil can be vanquished. In believing this, those who govern us at the present time reject a central insight of western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians: destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings themselves. In this old-fashioned understanding, evil is a propensity to destructive and self-destructive behaviour that is humanly universal. The restraints of morality exist to curb this innate human frailty; but morality is a fragile artifice that regularly breaks down. Dealing with evil requires an acceptance that it never goes away.
No view of things could be more alien at the present time. Whatever their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the west’s default creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing – however falteringly – to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved.
....
It’s in the Middle East, however, that the prevailing liberal worldview has proved most consistently misguided. At bottom, it may be western leaders’ inability to think outside this melioristic creed that accounts for their failure to learn from experience. After more than a decade of intensive bombing, backed up by massive ground force, the Taliban continue to control much of Afghanistan and appear to be regaining ground as the American-led mission is run down. Libya – through which a beaming David Cameron processed in triumph only three years ago, after the use of western air power to help topple Gaddafi – is now an anarchic hell-hole that no western leader could safely visit. One might think such experiences would be enough to deter governments from further exercises in regime change. But our leaders cannot admit the narrow limits of their power. They cannot accept that by removing one kind of evil they may succeed only in bringing about another – anarchy instead of tyranny, Islamist popular theocracy instead of secular dictatorship. They need a narrative of continuing advance if they are to preserve their sense of being able to act meaningfully in the world, so they are driven again and again to re-enact their past failures.
Many view these western interventions as no more than exercises in geopolitics. But a type of moral infantilism is no less important in explaining the persisting folly of western governments. Though it is clear that Isis cannot be permanently weakened as long as the war against Assad continues, this fact is ignored – and not only because a western-brokered peace deal that left Assad in power would be opposed by the Gulf states that have sided with jihadist forces in Syria. More fundamentally, any such deal would mean giving legitimacy to a regime that western governments have condemned as more evil than any conceivable alternative. In Syria, the actual alternatives are the survival in some form of Assad’s secular despotism, a radical Islamist regime or continuing war and anarchy. In the liberal political culture that prevails in the west, a public choice among these options is impossible.
There are some who think the very idea of evil is an obsolete relic of religion. For most secular thinkers, what has been defined as evil in the past is the expression of social ills that can in principle be remedied. But these same thinkers very often invoke evil forces to account for humankind’s failure to advance. The secularisation of the modern moral vocabulary that many believed was under way has not occurred: public discourse about good and evil continues to be rooted in religion. Yet the idea of evil that is invoked is not one that features in the central religious traditions of the west. The belief that evil can be finally overcome has more in common with the dualistic heresies of ancient and medieval times than it does with any western religious orthodoxy.
There follows an interesting discussion of Manicheanism and the views of Augustine, and then this:
In its official forms, secular liberalism rejects the idea of evil. Many liberals would like to see the idea of evil replaced by a discourse of harm: we should talk instead about how people do damage to each other and themselves. But this view poses a problem of evil remarkably similar to that which has troubled Christian believers. If every human being is born a liberal – as these latter-day disciples of Pelagius appear to believe – why have so many, seemingly of their own free will, given their lives to regimes and movements that are essentially repressive, cruel and violent? Why do human beings knowingly harm others and themselves? Unable to account for these facts, liberals have resorted to a language of dark and evil forces much like that of dualistic religions.
The efforts of believers to explain why God permits abominable suffering and injustice have produced nothing that is convincing; but at least believers have admitted that the ways of the Deity are mysterious. Even though he ended up accepting the divine will, the questions that Job put to God were never answered. Despite all his efforts to find a solution, Augustine confessed that human reason was not equal to the task. In contrast, when secular liberals try to account for evil in rational terms, the result is a more primitive version of Manichean myth. When humankind proves resistant to improvement, it is because forces of darkness – wicked priests, demagogic politicians, predatory corporations and the like – are working to thwart the universal struggle for freedom and enlightenment. There is a lesson here. Sooner or later anyone who believes in innate human goodness is bound to reinvent the idea of evil in a cruder form. Aiming to exorcise evil from the modern mind, secular liberals have ended up constructing another version of demonology, in which anything that stands out against what is believed to be the rational course of human development is anathematised.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Professor Amy Sepinwall has posted a paper entitled, "Conscience and Complicity: Assessing Pleas for Religious Exemptions in Hobby Lobby's Wake" to SSRN. The paper has a request not to be cited without permission, so of course I won't cite (or quote) any of it, not even its publicly available abstract. I will note, however, that it mentions my name in connection with the view that religious exemptions never impose cognizable harms on third parties.
In order to avoid any confusion about the matter, permit me to make my view plain. Religious accommodations always impose harms on third parties. I have said so repeatedly in my posts on the subject. Sometimes those harms will be legally cognizable, and I have never argued to the contrary. The tricky issues do not concern questions about per se legal cognizability of third party harms. They concern the context in which those harms are assessed as a legal matter, and the standard by which they are assessed. As to that question, it is true that I believe that the existing statutory frameworks of RFRA and RLUIPA incorporate an assessment of third-party harms. Within those statutory frameworks, third party harms may, indeed, sometimes be legally cognizable.
