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FULTON v. PHILADELPHIA 

ALITO, J., concurring in judgment
ALITO, J., concurring in judgment 

and  that  he  had  confessed  “not  to  the  church”  but  “to  his 
friends and neighbours.”  Id., at 162.  Because the court pro-
vided no explanation of its decision, this case sheds no light
on the understanding of the free-exercise right. 

All told, this mixed bag of antebellum decisions does little 
to support Smith, and extending the search past the Civil 
War does not advance Smith’s cause.  One of the objectives
of the Fourteenth Amendment, it has been argued, was to 
protect  the  religious  liberty  of  African-Americans  in  the 
South, where a combination of laws that did not facially tar-
get  religious  practice  had  been  used  to  suppress  religious 
exercise by slaves.  See generally Lash, The Second Adop-
tion of the Free Exercise Clause: Religious Exemptions Un-
der  the  Fourteenth  Amendment,  88  Nw.  U.  L.  Rev.  1106 
(1994). 

4 

Some have claimed that the drafting history of the Bill of 
Rights  supports  Smith.  See  Brief  for  First  Amendment 
Scholars as Amici Curiae 10–11; Muñoz, Original Meaning 
1085.  But as Professor Philip Hamburger, one of Smith’s 
most  prominent  academic  defenders,  has  concluded, 
“[w]hat any of this [history] implies about the meaning of
the Free Exercise Clause is speculative.”  Religious Exemp-
tion 928. 

Here is the relevant history.  The House debated a provi-
sion,  originally  proposed  by  Madison,  that  protected  the 
right to bear arms but included language stating that “no 
person,  religiously  scrupulous,  shall  be  compelled  to  bear 
arms.”  1 Annals of Cong. 749, 766 (1789); see also Muñoz,
Original Meaning 1112.  Some Members spoke in favor of