Religion & Law

John Inazu (Duke) has a worth-reading blog post on the CLS case here (at "The Faculty Lounge") and an op-ed on the case ("Siding with Sameness"), in the Raleigh News & Observer, here.  He says, among other things:

Martinez at its core involved a clash between equality and diversity, and in this case, diversity should have prevailed.  As I note in my op-ed, Justice Alito?s warning that Monday?s decision ?is a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country? doesn?t go far enough.  Expression presupposes existence.  And Martinez doesn?t silence the Christian Legal Society at Hastings?it destroys it.

That being said, this is a hard case. . . .

Also (as always) worth reading and thinking about is what Steve Smith (San Diego) has to say about the case, at "Law, Religion & Ethics":

To be sure, a law school should not be required to admit every type of speaker to its forum. I would think that the school might permissibly deny the benefits of its forum to, say, advocates of genocide, to give just one example. But it is deeply troubling that among the ample spectrum of views and voices that Hastings welcomes, a traditional Christian voice is the one that the school in fact singled out for exclusion.  And the fact that the school attempted to defend its exclusion by concocting a policy that could in principle exclude other ?voices? as well does not negate the conclusion that the school is excluding voices from the community of its forum.  It is even more troubling that a majority of Supreme Court Justices see no problem with that exclusion.

Also writing at LRE, Bob Cochran asks:

The Court framed its decision narrowly, but the decision?s principle seems to me to be huge.  The opinion creates risks for any religious group (maybe any group) that takes a position on anything and receives government funding.  The government can water down the position of any group by requiring an ?all comers? policy.  Would this allow, for example, a state to require that religious colleges take all comers on its faculty, permitting discrimination based only on ?neutral and generally applicable membership requirements unrelated to ?status or beliefs??