Category: Religion
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Sacred Ground and the Substantial Burden: Religious Liberty’s Indigenous Exception
By Priscilla L. Ho — In mid-March 2026, the U.S. Forest Service completed the transfer of 2,422 acres of the Tonto National Forest, including Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, or Oak Flat, to Resolution Copper. The deposit beneath Oak Flat is one of…
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Landor v. Louisiana: Placing a Much-Needed Price on Religious Oppression
By Mollie Mei — You can be an atheist. You can be a Buddhist. You can be a Hindu, or a Christian, or just about any religious identity that exists. What you cannot be, at least according to the First…
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What Should Replace Employment Division v. Smith, If Anything at All?
By Arit Mukherjee — Does the Free Exercise Clause mandate religious exemptions to facially neutral, generally applicable laws? In Employment Div. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), the Supreme Court answered in the negative. This precedent has been challenged before…
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The Erosion of Smith: Mahmoud v. Taylor and its Implications for the Free Exercise Clause
By Daeun Kim — Mahmoud v. Taylor marks a significant erosion of Employment Division v. Smith and signals a doctrinal shift toward revitalized, pre-Smith Free Exercise protections. By relying on Wisconsin v. Yoder rather than Smith, the Court reframed parental…
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Charters, Churches, and the Court: Gauging the Future of Religion in Public Education
Tarun Iyengar — Religious public education is an uncommon phrase in the United States given current jurisprudence relating to the 1st Amendment Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. However, this phrase has recently garnered serious attention after the Archdioceses of Oklahoma…
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Oklahoma’s Bible Controversy: Unpacking the Legality of the Bible Education Mandate
By Elaine Gao —- In the summer of 2024, the state of Oklahoma was torn apart not by the upcoming University of Oklahoma v. Oklahoma State University game but by state superintendent Ryan Walters’s bold
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What Constitutes a Human life?: Religious Language in Alabama’s Abortion Ruling
By Rida Mian — On February 16, 2024, the Supreme Court of Alabama released the controversial ruling that an extrauterine embryo is considered a person in the context of the law. The ruling came from an appeals case in which…
