Law professor and legal commentator Richard A. Epstein has published a new article on legal rulings involving religious liberty in the Hoover Institution publication, Defining Ideas. Epstein’s assessment of the reasoning behind a federal judge’s injunction against a Mississippi law protecting people with “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral conviction” is withering:
Judge Reeves struck down the Mississippi statute because he did not grasp the fundamental distinction between forcing others to yield to your beliefs and just asking to be left alone. His confusion is evident from his opening salvo that quotes the Supreme Court in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) as saying that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment means that the state “may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another.” He then usesMcCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union (2005) to argue that it violates the Establishment Clause—”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—”when the government acts with the ostensible and predominant purpose of advancing religion.” At no point, however, does Judge Reeves attempt to put either of these broad generalities into context. And context matters. The words in Epperson were directed to an Arkansas law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools—a clear instance of a state-compelled law that binds all persons inside the legal system. No one could describe this as a situation in which private parties sought to run their own lives and businesses free of government interference. Similarly, McCreary County struck down two county resolutions that announced that the Ten Commandments were Kentucky’s “precedent legal code,” and authorized extensive religious exhibits on public property intended to extol its virtues. There is no similar commitment of public resources in House Bill 1523. It is practically legal malpractice to rip out of context words that were rightly intended to knock down state coercion for religion and the state subsidy of religion while invalidating a statute whose whole purpose was to insulate private parties from any form of public coercion.
Read the rest here.
