Traditionally, the right to live according to conscience per se has not been as pervasive in law as religion, explicitly stated. This may reflect the greater difficulty of verifying sincere conscience outside of identifiable religions per se and, relatedly, perhaps due to the difficulty of differentiating a sincere case of conscience from simple lawbreaking. To the extent that American jurisprudence discounts other sources of conscience, this is a problem in the law, not with RLS.  However, this Index can contribute to an understanding of the many ways that laws that are thought to be neutral to certain concerns can still impose burdens upon those concerns and how states might make accommodations to alleviate or remove those burdens.  In practice, in the cases where states list “conscience” as a qualification for an exemption, we find that most states include religion within that umbrella term, and we consider those conscience provisions consistent with a religious safeguard, scoring items in those states accordingly.