Source: https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/degirolami-marc/page/2/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 08:35:00+00:00

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Legal Spirits Podcast: "A British Version of Masterpiece Cakeshop?"
I'm pleased to announce that our Center's new podcast series, Legal Spirits, is underway!
In this first podcast, Mark Movsesian and I chat about the "British Masterpiece" case, Lee v. Ashers Baking Co. decided by the UK Supreme Court a few weeks ago, and we speculate about what its reasoning might suggest for future cases in the US of this kind.
Legal Spirits podcasts will address a broad range of interesting cases, issues, and ideas involving law and religion. Look for our next one about the recent 4th Circuit Establishment Clause cross case just taken by the Supreme Court, the consolidated The American Legion v. American Humanist Association/Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association.
We are delighted to host Professor Robert Louis Wilken (the author of one of my favorite books on the history of the early Church) tomorrow to discuss his forthcoming book, "Liberty in the Things of God."
Professor Wilken's presentation is the first at our Colloquium in Law and Religion this fall, a seminar at St. John's Law School that my colleague, Mark Movsesian, and I co-teach. More soon on the substance of Professor Wilken's very interesting new book concerning the intellectual origins of the idea of religious freedom.
First Things Supreme Court Roundup: "Kennedy's Last Term"
Kevin Walsh and I have this year's Supreme Court roundup at First Things: Kennedy's Last Term. In the piece we cover some of the major decisions of the last term, including First Amendment cases (Masterpiece, NIFLA, Janus), cases concerning what we call "the influence of social, technological, and moral change on Supreme Court doctrine" (Wayfair, Carpenter, Murphy v. NCAA), and political gerrymandering/judicial limits cases (Gill, Benisek), as well as a short comment on Trump v. Hawaii.
Here is an interesting and provocative proposal by Professor Robert Delahunty and Mr. Andrew Ratelle in response to the ongoing crisis of the Church concerning widespread, decades-long sexual abuse of children by bishops and other clerical leaders.
I mostly wanted simply to note the argument here and the post. There is much to think about and discuss in it, and I hope my colleagues will weigh in. Lay involvement in selection/appointment implicates all sorts of complicated questions. One of these is about just what the Church would get if it went in this direction. What it will get will depend upon the formation and knowledge of the laity in Catholicism. But perhaps we are, at this point, not entitled to wish for another Ambrose or Augustine, and instead should simply insist as an initial matter on an end to the present disasters.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh's scholarly writing repeatedly raises the now well-known umpire analogy and emphasizes the aspiration to judicial "neutrality." I focus here on law reviews, and in particular some of his later pieces on statutory and constitutional rights interpretation, leaving the earlier separation of powers pieces to others.
For example, in his review essay, Fixing Statutory Interpretation, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 2118 (2016) (reviewing CJ. Robert Katzmann's book on statutory interpretation), he wrote: "The American rule of law, as I see it, depends on neutral, impartial judges who say what the law is, not what the law should be. Judges are umpires, or at least should always strive to be umpires. In a perfect world, at least as I envision it, the outcomes of legal disputes would not often vary based solely on the backgrounds, political affiliations, or policy views of judges." Likewise, in Two Challenges for the Judge as Umpire: Statutory Ambiguity and Constitutional Exceptions, 92 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1907 (2017), Kavanaugh said this: "I believe very deeply in those visions of the rule of law as a law of rules, and of the judge as umpire. By that, I mean a neutral, impartial judiciary that decides cases based on settled principles without regard to policy preferences or political allegiances or which party is on which side in a particular case." And he has a third short piece, The Judge As Umpire: Ten Principles, in a recent issue of the Catholic University Law Review.
It's a metaphor that has been used and criticized before. Perhaps the most prominent relatively recent example is in the confirmation hearings of CJ. John Roberts, who was also fond of the metaphor. But I think Judge Kavanaugh means something fairly specific by it, and that it has more concrete implications for the way in which he believes the prevailing methods of statutory and constitutional interpretation are flawed and should change.
Kavanaugh's primary objection in this area does not involve the issue of textualism and purposivism. He is quite clear that he is a textualist, and he notes in his review essay that CJ. Katzmann also claims to be a textualist. Instead, his objection concerns the binary of clarity and ambiguity. He raises two problems (previously discussed by Professor Ward Farnsworth): (1) how clear must the text be to be deemed clear? 80% clear? 50% clear? Less? More? (2) how does a judge know what level of clarity a text actually has achieved? Because these threshold issues are indeterminate, the interpreting judge has too few rules for getting to the point where he can determine which of the two binaries--clear or ambiguous--to settle on. Kavanaugh argues that in consequence a judge's predisposition toward textualism or purposivism does the work here. It orients the judge either toward or against finding ambiguity, and then it's off and running with the substantive canons of interpretation.
Kavanaugh offers a solution this threshold issue: rather than forcing the judge to choose one of the two binaries from the get-go, he argues that the judge should offer her "best reading of the statute," guided by some semantic canons and context. There are some problems with this proposal, in my view, primary among which is that I am uncertain that this sort of approach solves the issue of predisposition toward textualism or purposivism. An example: Kavanaugh does not care for the semantic canon, eiusdem generis, which holds that the last general term in a sequence should be interpreted in light of previous, more specific terms ("dogs, pigs, sheep, and other animals" should be read to include pigs and horses but not amoebas and tapirs). Kavanaugh says that "other animals" should instead mean any or all other animals, and to apply eiusdem generis allows a judge to, as Justice Kagan put it, take it upon herself to find the "common denominator." But I'm not sure I agree on the merits, and at the very least I think this example illustrates some problems with Kavanaugh's "best reading of the statute" approach, one which he agrees must make use of context.
The point of this post, though, is to connect his substantive comments to his larger umpire analogy. The trouble with the current binary regime of clarity/ambiguity is that it is does not offer judges sufficiently clear, basic rules for interpreting statutes. It does not stimulate judges to aspire to neutrality. It instead stimulates the opposite: a smuggling in, under the pretense of simply "finding" clarity/ambiguity, of the judge's predispositions toward textualism or purposivism. And judges are also seen to be doing that smuggling by the general public.
Kavanaugh makes a parallel criticism of constitutional interpretation. Here, one of his primary targets is the tiers of scrutiny in the evaluation of individual rights as against government interests. The problem with the 1950s-era invention of the tiers of scrutiny (substantial burdens, compelling interests, rational bases, narrow tailoring, etc.) is that they are, at best, "rather indeterminate," and at worst, "empty of real, determinate, objective meaning." They offer no, or very little, transparent guidance to the judicial interpreter. At best, they are "mood-setters." And the mood that they set is the mood the judge happens to be in about the right at issue. So that judges applying these standards are invited to smuggle in other reasons for ruling as they do. And they are seen to do so by all of the rest of us, since it is in the nature of the tiers to push judges in this direction.
Or consider the issue of exceptions to certain constitutional rights--the right to free speech, for example, or the right to keep and bear arms. Is it any surprise, says Kavanaugh, that the tiers of scrutiny can offer no help in resolving when to find such exceptions? Worse still, is it any surprise that when judges apply the tiers of scrutiny purportedly to find exceptions to constitutional rights, they are doing so in ways that are, and appear to be, non-neutral--non umpire-like? There are other judges who have made similar claims about the tiers (see, most recently, Justice Thomas's dissent in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt). But one can see a critical unity in Kavanaugh's objections to the prevailing methods of statutory and constitutional interpretation: both suffer from the same problems and need similar correctives.
Unlike in the statutory interpretation context, Kavanaugh does not offer a developed solution to this problem. But perhaps the most interesting part of his argument (to me, at least) is his view that it would be preferable to rely on historical and traditional limits on particular rights to find exceptions than to rely on the tiers of scrutiny to do so. He says: "At the moment, I do not have a solution to this concern. Requiring judges to focus on history and tradition, as Justice Scalia suggested, might establish a much clearer strike zone for these “exceptions” cases." And his Second Amendment dissent in Heller v. DC (DC Cir 2011) suggested just such an approach. He also raised "history and tradition," together with "precedent," as important for his judicial method in his acceptance last night.
We'll have to wait and see if and how these threads come together if he is confirmed.
In light of its pertinence again--it's an issue that never seems to go out of style--and what I believe to be a prototypically "Response One" form of engagement in the column Rick links to below, I'm reposting this from seven years ago (I'm old now) on the unavoidable shallowness of inquiries about religion for political ends.
Jacques Lacan’s famous discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis as a form of talking cure, in which the analyst is able to shape the meanings of the subject’s hangups and mental infirmities, came to my mind during the recent exchange between Rick Garnett, Paul Horwitz, Rob Vischer, and others (see here) on the issue of quizzing political candidates about how their religious beliefs will affect their decisions. Yesterday, as my colleague Mark notes, Ross Douthat had a column on the issue, with a number of interesting recommendations for journalists.
But I had a thought that may strike some as perhaps a little heterodox. I want to make a point in (partial, limited) defense of the Rortian “religion as conversation-stopper” view (which Rorty only really very partially revised after an elegant intervention by Jeffrey Stout a few years ago). When candidate X claims that she is informed in her thinking about political issue Y by her religious beliefs and traditions, this is sometimes (not always, but often enough) not the sort of claim that can be understood thoroughly by the public through thorough public discussion, stimulated by extensive question and answer sessions devised by journalists otherwise hostile to the candidate’s political position. What is more likely to happen is that religion — whether the candidate’s or not — will be used as a kind of instrument through which the journalist’s political orientation can be reaffirmed and re-cemented.
I want to examine the responses in turn. Response One is motivated by an adversarially political aim, and it seems to me that it is a true reflection of the way in which political discourse is conducted. That is because political discourse is, fundamentally (though of course not universally), shallow.
[W]ith Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement last week, many of our fellow conservatives are suddenly buoyant. They believe everything is about to change. It is a perennial temptation. If only one or two justices had been different — a Robert Bork rather than an Anthony Kennedy, an “anybody else” rather than a David Souter — then, it is imagined, we would inhabit a different constitutional universe. The problem is simply a matter of personnel. Now at last we will get our chance to fix the country, they think.
Let us not get our hopes too high. Even if Justice Kennedy is replaced with an actual conservative, as we hope and expect, the Supreme Court cannot save a degraded culture, nor can it degrade a virtuous one — not too much in either direction, at least. Conservatives seeking lasting change are better advised to attend to our failures in the broader culture than to prepare the way for our Supreme Court savior. Otherwise, we are likely to be sorely disappointed.
To be sure, law is important. It forms the culture around us, just as much as it is informed by it. Indeed, the Supreme Court has made itself a powerful symbol of an American yearning to resolve profound cultural conflict once and for all. It has come to exercise a potent didactic function over the past several decades. It instructs us, scolds us and exhorts us to follow it. It has become a relentless smasher and refashioner of rights.
As some feverishly speculate about which 5-to-4 decisions of the recent past will soon vanish, we counsel patience. Conservatives have rightly criticized the judicial manufacture of rights; let us not make the mirror-image mistake of urging immediate doctrinal demolition. The legal landscape may change for the better through erosion and accretion, rather than avulsion and ill-considered construction.
Chief Justice John Marshall once wrote that “a constitution is framed for ages to come, and is designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.” But today, new constitutional law is born and killed off in waves in response to the felt imperatives of cultural change. This is the Supreme Court we have now, borne of the culture we have now. No bright, shiny, new justice can change it alone.
When the big Obamacare case came down in 2012, one of the most interesting features of the resulting ferment was Larry Solum's insight that the disagreement between the sides could be understood as a fundamental divergence as to overarching conceptions of the scope of the Commerce Clause and the validity of the "New Deal Settlement." A "gestalt" is an organizing framework for understanding a particular legal issue--a jurisprudential weltanschauung. A gestalt is "the big picture that integrates a high-level description of doctrine with vindicating narratives and justifying normative theories." The gestalt does not mandate a particular outcome. But it situates and shapes the general perception of a case in such a way as to orient the interpreter in a very particular direction.
a sea of federal power that spans the globe. The New Federalism decisions of the Rehnquist Court created islands of state power, including the anticommandeering principle of Printz v. United States and New York v. United States, the expanded Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity doctrine of Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman, and the Lopez and Morrison limits on the Commerce Clause. Thus, the prevailing gestalt underwent modification—the ocean of federal power was dotted with isolated islands of state sovereignty—but the basic pattern (the sea of federal power) remained intact.
The alternative gestalt, in Solum's telling, accepts the New Deal Settlement but adopts a "this far and no further" attitude toward it. The New Federalism cases (Lopez, Morrison, and now possibly NFIB, etc.) correct the errors of the most extreme of the New Deal gestalt cases (e.g., Wickard) and invert the oceanic metaphor. It is state, not federal, power that controls the gestalt. Or at least it should and it will.
I want to suggest that recent cases involving religious freedom, and many future cases, reflect a working out of a parallel set of gestalts as to religious freedom. And the competing gestalts are likely to become more fixed in the coming years--more distinct and therefore less capable of reconciliation. They are fundamentally different ways of seeing things.
In what one could call the "dominant" or perhaps "establishment" gestalt--the Everson dispensation, let's call it--the Court vigorously polices any suggestion that what has been the historically dominant religion in this country--Christianity--appears to receive any preferential treatment, recognition, or even historical acknowledgment by the government. That has been, as I discuss here, the primary way in which "separation of church and state" has been worked out as informing the Establishment Clause since 1947. The working out of the Everson dispensation was a project undertaken over decades by its champions, ostensibly under the banner of "religious neutrality" but in reality with a very distinctive effect (if not an intent) that was not neutral whether or not so perceived. Free exercise, for the Everson dispensation, existed in the majority of the 20th century primarily as a gesture of noblesse oblige to the unthreateningly strange and exotic. It was never intended to extend a set of legal defenses for traditional forms of Christianity, since Christianity held a dominant historical and socio-cultural position that needed to be destabilized. The effect of this dual action of the dominant gestalt was systematically to shrink the public political presence of Christianity in the national civic ethos and at the same time to increase the importance of "religion" as an individual right of spiritual self seeking. This was "religious freedom" in the dominant gestalt, and it was an enormously successful jurisprudential project from the early 20th century through the early 21st. For this project, the objective was continuing progress along the lines mentioned. To continue to shrink the civic and political influence of Christianity while at the same time rendering the idea of "religion" as an individual good more powerful. But a vital part of this project involves the monitoring of Christian civic influence and efforts towards its continuing diminution. For adherents of the dominant gestalt, cases like Hobby Lobby, Masterpiece Cakeshop, and Town of Greece, are evidence of dangerous stalling. Cases like Trump v. Hawaii in combination with Masterpiece are deeply threatening because they are evidence that Christianity (or, in even more strongly held versions of the claim, "white" Christianity) continues to be preferred over other religions despite the best efforts of the Everson dispensation's champions. It is no consolation at all to hear the Trump v. Hawaii majority's reassurance that the Everson dispensation still controls for holiday displays and high school graduations. Failure to progress is regression.
The other gestalt (I don't have a catchy name for it--let's go with gestalt #2) accepts certain basic understandings of church-state separation. Just as in the Commerce Clause division, there is not a wholesale rejection by gestalt #2 of gestalt #1. But whatever gestalt #2's "this far and no further" stance might look like, it was bypassed years ago. Gestalt #2 holds that the Everson dispensation largely has done its work: to diminish the public influence of Christianity and replace it with "religion"--always ill-defined or intentionally non-defined--as an individual experience. There are divisions within this gestalt. Some of its proponents feel that Christianity merits a special place in the national culture; some take the weaker view that it is at least not unconstitutional to recognize such a place, whether it actually exists or not; and some believe that Christianity merits at least similar (or even equal) favorable treatment to other religious traditions, generally through application of free exercise principles. These divisions have not been fully plumbed because gestalt #2 has never achieved any real salience in 20th-21st century religion clause law. Where it generally attempts to hold the line as to Christianity today is in issues of compelling Christian believers to act in ways that violate their own convictions (Hobby Lobby, Zubik, Masterpiece, Becerra in its way). And this is precisely where, today, it comes into some conflict with the Everson dispensation, whose imperative is to continue to diminish Christianity--or at least conservative Christianity--as a force in American public life. This is gestalt #2's "this far and no further" stand, having been soundly defeated over decades in making its stand at previous possible way stations (just follow the path of Establishment Clause jurisprudence since 1947 for the grand tour). When those who favor the alternative gestalt hear proponents of the dominant gestalt cry out that Masterpiece plus Trump v. Hawaii represents a retrogression--Christianity beating back and beating out other religions--most do not share that view. It is a view that does not account for the massive losses sustained by Christianity at the Court's hands for the last near-century, and the massive reconception of the nature of "religion" undertaken by the Court's jurisprudence in that period. Of course, those losses and reconceptions were not occasioned by the Court alone. But the Court was much more than sympathetic to them; it did what it could to push them along, and successfully too. And the losses have not been limited to religious freedom cases proper. Just have a look, say the proponents of gestalt #2, at the havoc wrought by the Court's substantive due process cases. Those, in combination with the religious freedom canon of the dominant gestalt, have been devastating. Telling a Christian baker that he doesn't have to bake a cake for a ceremony he finds immoral, or a Christian company that it doesn't have to pay for contraceptive products for its employees, or a Christian pregnancy center that it doesn't have to advertise the availability and desirability of abortion...these are tiny and rather pathetic victories (most of them achieved by a bare 5-4 vote) in a wasteland of failure, to be followed in future by more failures. They are hardly signs that gestalt #2 is suddenly ascendant. They are not even signs of, as Larry puts it, a "gestalt shift."
Here's a final prediction. The divisions are likely to increase, in part because of gestalt #1's imperative of progress and gestalt #2's imperative of stasis (at best). If the prediction is correct, and if the Court's members break fairly evenly as between the two gestalts, we can reliably expect more spasms of outrage and disappointment with each new case in this area. These are not disputes over doctrine or even principle. They are deep disagreements over worldview, and over the kind of society we wish to be and become.
Sam Bray has an extremely interesting reflection on a change in the language of a central prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, the General Confession in Morning and Evening Prayer. The prayer contains the line "And there is no health in us," whose meaning is either that there is no spiritual health in us or that we are not the authors of our own salvation. Either way, the phrase suggests, as Sam puts it, that "we are prone to curve inward away from God, we need his forgiveness."
But the phrase has proved troublesome and has been touched up in several revisions. The cause of the trouble is that it is felt to sound a little rough to modern speakers and hearers. It needed some kind of toning down. Really, no health at all in us? Not even a little bit of health?
The Anglican Church in North America, in a recent update, changed the language to: "And apart from your grace, there is no health in us." That keeps Cranmer's original phrase, but softens it a little bit to reassure people that God does not think us totally irredeemable just the way we are. And the added phrase is surely not wrong; it's true that God's grace is necessary for spiritual health as well as salvation.
And yet, as Sam notes, "truth does not quite settle the question," since many things that are true do not make it into the prayer. Sam shows how the absolute language and sentiment of the original is in keeping with many other Biblical passages (Isaiah, Psalms, Daniel, and even in Luke). This is language without qualification, a pattern of speaking that may be seen even in the Beatitudes ("Blessed are the poor in spirit," not Blessed are those who are often, even if not 100% of the time, spiritually impoverished) and elsewhere. As Sam says, "Even where a qualification is denotatively true, its destruction of the proper attitude can make it connotatively false."
There is much more in Sam's rich reflection, which considers the rhetorical power of the original and the changed versions (matters of style are not only matters of style, and, as Sam says, "the form can be an integral part of the message") as well as the genuine difficulties facing would-be revisers who wish not to damage the true sense of the original. You should read it.
Like Rick, I have been enjoying the ongoing ferment about liberalism and the American founding/experiment/project. It's a fun time to listen to what people have to say on the question and hear different points of view. I don't have fixed views on the genealogical doubts that Rick raises (curious to hear from others on that front), though I am in agreement that the diagnostic program--still in its infancy--is an exciting one that offers a lot for the scholar of law or politics who is interested in it.
I'd put the point perhaps slightly differently. It isn't so much that government "would not command its citizens to use their freedom well." It is that government, in at least ostensibly abjuring any interest in the substantive uses of freedom, would neglect this feature of freedom--its affective side--and would in consequence foster, never quite expressly but nevertheless relentlessly, a particular and quite non-neutral understanding of the point of the freedoms it protects. An understanding that would be internalized and entrenched over centuries, whatever the natural rights view defended by Phillip and the likes of Thomas West (whose book is very interesting) may have once looked like.
One might derive from this point of contact (if such it is) between Phillip and the "radicals" a specific research program focusing on different streams of intellectual history during the founding period (e.g., in the church-state context, but certainly not only there) with an eye specifically on the development of the idea of freedom in the subsequent decades and centuries. It may turn out both that the founding generation's ideas about the uses of freedom were quite varied (just as varied as ours are) and that there are reasons for the dominance of certain of these ideas and the recessiveness of others over the centuries.

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