Legal Commentary

     I just returned from a wonderful conference on "Twenty Years After Employment Division v. Smith" at Cardozo Law School. Perhaps my only complaint is that the wireless internet access at my hotel was extremely spotty, so I wasn?t able to report on the conference until I got home.

    Though it would be a truly daunting task to attempt to summarize the large and diverse array of papers, there are a couple of interesting themes that ran through the presentations. One of those is that Smith was perhaps not the earth-shattering revolution in Free Exercise jurisprudence that many commentators considered it to be at the time. Indeed, there are a number of areas (such as family law and employment law) in which Smith appears to have had virtually no effect at all. Another surprising realization for me was that there are not (or at least no longer) as many opponents of Smith out there in the legal academy as I had expected. The views toward Smith were by no means universally hostile, and perhaps tended more toward the friendly side.

    The papers will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Cardozo Law Review, and I expect, based on the presentations, that there will be a number of interesting and important contributions. The conference agenda and speaker list is available here.