Religious freedom and the Roberts court’s doctrinal clean-up

Those who think and write about the Supreme Court, including many of the justices themselves, tend to collect and deploy colorful adjectives and epithets to describe the state of its religion clauses doctrine and case law. It is not necessary to go full-thesaurus or to march out the entire parade of pejoratives here. A “hot mess” was the recent pronouncement of one federal court of appeals. And my own favorite is still Justice Antonin Scalia’s 1993 portrayal of the so-called “Lemon test” as a “ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad after being repeatedly killed and buried.”

An important part of the Roberts court story, though, is that it has both continued and facilitated developments-for-the-better in law-and-religion. Chief Justice John Roberts, following in several ways the example and path of his predecessor, William Rehnquist (for whom he and – full disclosure – I clerked), has directed, not merely endorsed or observed, these changes. The standard, habitual denunciations no longer seem to apply. As Larry David might put it, the law of the religion clauses is actually “pretty, pretty good.”

Full article by Richard Garnett at SCOTUSblog.