Philip Hamburger has this short piece, which distills arguments that he makes in this very interesting article. I highly recommend both. The abstract of the long piece and a few quick highlights:
Religious Americans are substantially excluded from the political process that produces laws, and this prompts sobering questions about the reality of religious equality. Put simply, political exclusion threatens religious equality.
The exclusion is two-fold. It arises partly from the growth of administrative power, which leaves Americans, including religious Americans, no opportunity to vote for or against their administrative lawmakers. It also arises from section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. As a result of this section, even when law is made in Congress (or an elected state legislature), religious organizations are restricted in their freedom to petition and to campaign for or against their lawmakers. There thus is a broad exclusion of religious Americans and their organizations from the political process that shapes lawmaking, and Americans thereby have lost essential mechanisms for persuading their lawmakers to avoid burdening their religious beliefs.
Religious liberty thus comes with an unexpected slant. Courts blithely assume that America offers a flat or even legal landscape — a broad and equitable surface on which all Americans can participate equally, regardless of their religion. The underlying exclusion, however, tilts the entire game, so that apparently equal laws actually slant against religion. What is assumed to be a flat and natural landscape turns out to be an artificially tilted game.
The conceptual framing of religious liberty therefore needs to expanded. The central conceptual problem for the free exercise of religion is usually understood as the choice between exemption and equality — the choice between a freedom from equal laws, on account of one’s religion, and a freedom under equal laws, regardless of one’s religion. The conceptual problem, however, turns out to be more complicated. In addition to the constitutional choice between exemption and equality, one must also consider the role of exclusion.
Of course the political exclusion of Americans as a result of the growth of the administrative state would not affect only religious Americans, and Philip recognizes this in the paper. But his particular focus is on the political exclusions that the administrative process has worked on those with religious convictions--and particularly on those whose religious convictions run contrary to or are in tension with the commitments of those in political power. "Those who are sailing with prevailing winds, theological and political, do not suffer much from the exclusion."
The argument about section 501(c)(3) is particularly interesting. As is well-known, this provision offers a kind of deal to religious, educational, and charitable organizations: so long as you do not campaign and advocate for political persons and causes, the state will not tax you. The common justification for the imposition of these constraints is that they are merely conditions on spending, but Philip argues here (as he has before) that limits on government power cannot be waived by consent--"private consent cannot enlarge constitutional power." Constitutional rights are not "tradable commodities." So the government cannot cut the deal it has cut in section 501(c)(3); it has no power to do so. Philip also questions the idea that exemptions are the same as expenditures for purposes of the spending power. "If refraining from taxing amounted to spending, then all Americans continually would be recipients of government largesse, for the government might have taxed them at a higher rate, and the decision not to impose the higher rate would be a tax expenditure." If that were true, the government could apply 501(c)(3) against all Americans.
The idea here is that the reason not to tax churches and religious organizations is not that they made a deal with the government in exchange for which they are get the privilege of an exemption. The reason not to tax them is that taxes are not proper as against organizations whose principal mission is nonprofit. Exemptions here are merely mechanisms for recognizing that a tax is inappropriate for organizations that ordinarily have no income. Philip then takes aim at the various justifications for the partial political exclusion worked by 501(c)(3)--that the restriction is "not draconian," that allows other avenues for religious groups to participate in the political process (the Russian Doll analogy to what is permitted by 501(c)(4) was particularly effective), the 'we need a mechanism to stop tax deductible political contributions' claim--arguing that none of them is sufficient to counter the constitutional problems.
Here's a thought experiment in the piece: suppose the government attempted to apply 501(c)(3) restrictions to professors. Professors are supposed to be disinterested observers, so the government decides to make a distinction between academics and politics. Therefore, as professors (as opposed to as private individuals), they cannot engage in any campaigning or substantial petitioning. After all, professors benefit from a whole lot of federal spending on their students and their univerisities, so it's perfectly ok to condition federal aid to universities on the absence of political participation of various kinds by professors. And, anyway, if they were true academics, they wouldn't engage in politicking anyway. I suspect many would think this quite absurd. And as Philip says, "[t]he larger constitutional point is that the reasons for suppression are plentiful, but this does not mean that they make the suppression constitutional."
Friday, March 7, 2014
Tom's post below raises some important issues, but as Kevin says, our paper does not answer in a complete way the question of what constitutes the ideal disposition of the judge. What it does is to direct some attention to the question itself and to reconceptualize the intellectual projects of judges who ostensibly are said to be writing (and at times themselves purport to be writing) about constitutional theory as adverbial projects--projects about the quality of good judging. One might believe that in order to think well about judging, one needs to think first about the qualities, habits of mind, and dispositions of the good judge. But one of the themes of our paper is that interpretive constitutional theory has come so much to dominate scholarly inquiry in constitutional law that it is difficult even to understand other sorts of constitutional projects for what they are.
One of the reasons for this blind spot is methodological. You cannot tell very much at all about the habits of mind of the good judge by asking that judge to reduce to a writing his theory of constitutional interpretation. You won't get the information you are looking for (though you will get the chance to score some easy points and look clever by punching holes in his theory). Instead, you need to examine whom the judge admires, and why, and which "school" the judge aspires to join and be thought within, and which other judges are dispositional compatriots--all projects within the domain of intellectual history. But you also have to compare what the judge does in constitutional adjudication against what he says he does extrajudicially. That is, you need to be a good and careful doctrinalist, not in order to trap anybody but so that you can see the many ways in which constitutional law in practice complicates constitutional theory.
An additional advantage of making the move from theory to disposition is that it permits the scholar to criticize judicial pragmatism and restraint on their own terms--as dispositions rather than as theories of constitutional interpretation--and therefore to engage more directly and more truly with the sorts of projects in constitutional law that interest judges. Part III of our paper does just that. In its final section, we look to the example of Judge Henry Friendly, who was neither a pragmatic judge (here we respectfully disagree with Judge Posner) nor a restrained judge. Indeed, Judge Friendly always resisted such labels and never was particularly interested in what was then the dernier cri of Dworkinian moralism. But what, exactly, did Friendly stand for? The model of lawyerly craft and argument that he represented does little to enrich legal theory, and this has led some academic commenters to wonder whether Friendly will be forgotten by future generations. Perhaps so. But that may say more about the peculiar reputational preoccupations of the legal academy than about the much more interesting question of what dispositions make for a good judge. Lots of work remains to be done in thinking through that question.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Tom's comparison of judicial pragmatism and judicial restraint with Niehbuhrian Christian realism shows how it can help to understand each of these as appropriate dispositions when engaging in various forms of practical reasoning. Tom contends that Niebuhrian realism disposes religious and political activists "to combine vigorous advocacy with deep humility." He observes that good dispositions are virtues, and that such virtues "may be more powerful and determinative than the precise logic of analysis." And he concludes by asking about the value of judicial pragmatism and judicial restraint as providing an appropriate disposition toward the activity of judging.
Tom's comments and question helpfully bring to the surface an issue that Marc and I do not resolve in the paper. We speak of Posner and Wilkinson as advocating for particular judicial dispositions as features of judicial excellence. This terminology leads toward understanding the qualities of good judging in virtue-based terms. But we do not explicitly endorse a virtue-based account as against some other type of account. At other times in the paper, we speak in terms of judicial office or judicial role or judicial duty. We do this less to contrast a virtue approach with a deontological approach than to capture an aspect of judging that both pragmatism and restraint rub up against in various ways--the obligation of law. If the law requires something, the judge should neither be pragmatic nor restrained to the exclusion of the requirements of the law. Neither Posner nor Wilkinson claims otherwise. But too strong an emphasis on sensibility or disposition tends in that direction. One can see this in various ways in the cases that we describe in the second part of our paper.
While an emphasis on appropriate judicial dispositions toward constitutional adjudication stands in some tension with an emphasis on the right way to figure out what the law requires, it is nonetheless helpful to recognize the two as distinct. This enables analysts to discuss the contribution and the limits of each type of guide for judges. And when figuring out the right dispositions for judges in constitutional adjudication, it matters that the particular form of practical reasoning at issue is judicial legal reasoning. Appropriate dispositions toward the kind of practical reasoning engaged in by political and religious activists are not the same as appropriate dispositions toward judicial legal reasoning in constitutional cases.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
The received wisdom is that, nowithstanding his enormous intellect and brilliance, Justice Frankfurter's overbearing personality in combination with his 'on-the-wrong-side-of-history' position in Minersville v. Gobitis was enough to do him in as an influential voice on the Supreme Court. Gobitis does seem universally reviled; Professor Sherry in this article lists it alongside Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and some others as among the wrongest of the wrong. Justice Frankfurter has long been associated with judicial restraint in constitutional adjudication, and Gobitis certainly could be classified as a judicially restrained decision. Indeed, it could be taken to support Professor Sherry's thesis--that what we need is more judicial "activitism" and less judicial restraint.
In our article, Kevin and I note how common it is for both Judge Posner and Judge Wilkinson to discuss judicial greatness in constitutional adjudication not by reference to constitutional theory, but instead by considering personalities, styles of thought, dispositions, and character traits. When they talk about judicial excellence, these judges are wont to engage in intellectual portraiture more than abstract theorizing. And we observe that Judge Wilkinson often lists Justice Frankfurter as one of his most admired examples of the "school" (Wilkinson's term--evoking a community of practitioners, such as a school of artists) of judicial restraint--one which Wilkinson claims as his own.
How, then, to explain Justice Frankfurter's widely perceived fall from grace? "The tragedy of Mr. Justice Frankfurter," the historian Melvin Urofsky has written, was that he became "prisoner to an idea--judicial restraint." But if we are right, the tragedy was not Frankfurter's, but judicial restraint's. Frankfurter's error was not in pledging allegiance to an idea, but to the wrong idea. To use Wilkinsonian imagery, from the time of Thayer it was already plain to see that judicial restraint could not bear the cosmic burden laid on it in the face of the coming challenge of legal realism. Judicial restraint was a rearguard defensive action--an apologetic strategy--and its adaptation in the hands of each of its subsequent adherents (Frankfurter, Bickel, and so on) served to illustrate its weakness as a persuasive response to the problematics of twentieth century constitutional adjudication.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
My colleague, Mark Movsesian, has a very interesting paper on the growing importance of the "Nones"--those who claim no religious affiliation at all but by and large are neither atheists nor agnostics. Rather, the Nones reject institutional religious belief. As Mark puts it, "A better term for them might be religious 'Independents,' or the familiar 'spiritual but not religious.'" The paper considers some of the legal ramifications of "none-ism," including the relationship between group status and legal protection. Here's the abstract.
The most important recent development in American religion is the dramatic increase in the number of people who claim no religious affiliation — the rise of the Nones. In this Working Paper, I discuss the social factors that explain the rise of the Nones--demography, politics, family, technology, a distrust of institutions generally--and explain what this development might mean for the definition of religion in American law. I focus on a recent federal appeals court case involving a self-styled spiritual adviser, “Psychic Sophie,” who claimed that following her “inner flow” constituted a religion meriting constitutional and statutory protection. I argue that the case is a close one. Protecting Nones as a religion would promote the important goals of state religious neutrality and personal autonomy. On the other hand, religion has always been understood in terms of community. Indeed, as Tocqueville saw, it is precisely religion’s communal aspect that makes it so important to liberal democracy. Granting Nones the status of a religion would fail to capture this important social benefit.
Monday, February 24, 2014
For the last couple of years, Kevin Walsh and I have been working on an article about judicial critique of constitutional theory and the separation between constitutional theory and constitutional adjudication. Our new piece is called Judge Posner, Judge Wilkinson, and Judicial Critique of Constitutional Theory, and we hope to have some further discussion about it in the coming days and weeks. Here is the abstract:
Judge Richard Posner’s well-known view is that constitutional theory is useless. And Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III has lambasted constitutional theory for the way in which its “cosmic” aspirations threaten democratic self-governance. Many other judges hold similar views. And yet both Posner and Wilkinson — in the popular press, in law review articles, and in books — have advocated what appear to be their own theories of how to judge in constitutional cases. Judicial pragmatism for Posner and judicial restraint for Wilkinson seem to be substitutes for originalism, living constitutionalism, political process theory, and so on. But both Posner and Wilkinson also deny that they are offering a theory at all. This is puzzling. How do these judges simultaneously reject constitutional theory yet seemingly replace it with theories of their own?
This Article answers that question — a question that must be answered in order to understand the present-day relationship between constitutional theory and constitutional adjudication. The perspectives of Judge Posner and Judge Wilkinson are particularly valuable because they have not only decided hundreds of constitutional cases but have also written extensively about constitutional theory. Drawing on a close reading of revealing slices of both their extrajudicial writing and their judicial opinions in constitutional cases, this Article makes three contributions. First, it brings to light agreements between Posner and Wilkinson that run far deeper than the heralded differences between them and that stem from their situated understanding of their judicial role. Second, it exposes the limited influence of judicial pragmatism and judicial restraint on these judges’ own constitutional jurisprudence even in those cases where one might expect constitutional theory to exert maximal influence. Third, it explains how judicial pragmatism and judicial restraint are best understood not as constitutional theories but as descriptions of judicial dispositions — character traits that pertain to judicial excellence — that can and should be criticized on their own terms.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
I have been a contributor to Mirror of Justice for roughly half of the span of its life, having joined in 2010. My career as a law professor is roughly the same age: I started at my beloved St. John's Law School in 2009. Blogging here has always been an important and integral part of how I conceive part of my writing duties. I like to write, but not because I believe that what I write is particularly important, insightful, or impactful (it isn't). I simply enjoy the process of working out and putting down my thoughts, and think my life would be much the poorer if I were not blessed with the good fortune of doing so.
MOJ has given me a wonderful additional writing outlet. But it has also changed my perspective about writing as a duty. It has impressed upon me the value of speaking to a broader audience, again not for reasons of my "influence" (paltry would be a generous description) but because it is enriching to hear from and speak with more people rather than fewer. And, on a more personal note, it has helped me to recognize that writing is, for me, a vocation. I would not feel right with the world if I could not write. Since I began in November of 2010, I have written about 500 posts, some mercifully short and some (looking back on them now) unendurably long. Why would anybody do this? Nobody will read them again--not even me. I have to conclude that I write them for the same reason I write anything else--from something of a sense of compulsion or reflex necessity or calling. Perhaps from a sense of obligation, too, or in order to get certain ideas out into general circulation. But MOJ has helped me to understand that my internal reasons for writing are much more important than any external reasons, or reasons that are motivated by consequences.
Enough navel-gazing, and onto a final broader point about this blog and my gratitude toward it. "Intellectual diversity" in the legal academy has received some attention lately. Generally the phrase is taken to mean something approaching ideological diversity--not exactly a rough equivalence of thinkers "on the right" and "on the left," but something of that sort.
But for me, intellectual diversity is not so much ideological diversity as it is the diversity of intellectual cultivation, style, interest, and expression. The joy of Mirror of Justice, for me, is to be a participant in the collection of contributions all nestled within the capacious and yet tailored overcoat of Catholic thought--a true wealth of stylstic and intellectual perspective. It is Tom Berg's consistently penetrating and thoughtful commentary--a perennial and particular source of sustenance and provocation for me. It is Michael Moreland's formidable theological erudition in bringing to light an insight of Karl Barth or Robert Bellarmine. It is Lisa Schiltz's always moving reflections about human frailty and disability. It is Michael Perry speaking grandly in the religious register of international human rights. It is John Breen and Richard Myers, both of whom distinguish themselves with passionate and powerful comments about human life. It is Robert Hockett with his critical and discerning remarks about economic justice. And Russell Powell's informed and expert remarks on Islamic jurisprudence. It is Kevin Walsh's keen, precise, and far-sighted doctrinal and historical illuminations. Michael Scaperlanda with his sage ruminations about immigration and human anthopology. It is Rob Vischer's equanimous, tempered, and subtle interventions on the nuances of conscience. It is Patrick Brennan's brilliantly laser-like, intense focus on a point of natural law. It is Susan Stabile's spiritually and mystically rich interlocutions. It is Robby George with his profound philosophical acumen and his sharp eye for, as he has put it elsehwere, the "moral ecology" of a society. It is Fr. Araujo with his wide-ranging cosmological insights worthy of Tapparelli. It is Greg Sisk detailing a new and enlightening empirical insight. It is Mary Leary from her deeply morally righteous perspective as the protector and champion of abused children. It is Cecelia Klingele (welcome!) drawing from similar perspectival reservoirs when speaking about prisoners. And it is Rick Garnett, with his consistently generous, sensible, clear-eyed, and good-souled disposition. Each member, posting missives composed in a unique and distinctive style, together composing a society of Catholic legal scholars.
It has been a pleasure and privilege to be part of this republic of Catholic legal letters.
