I’m following up on my post on Monday highlighting Yeshiva University’s emergency application to the Supreme Court seeking relief from an injunction that would require it to approve an undergraduate LGBTQ club. The Supreme Court has invited the parties opposing Yeshiva’s application to file their response by the end of Friday. In the meantime, I’ve encountered some claims that the history of Yeshiva’s charter “as an educational institution” makes the legal issues before the Court much more complicated than my initial post would indicate. I would like to explain here why that is not so. It’s important to have in mind what is, and what is not, before the Court. Specifically, it is essential to distinguish the federal constitutional matters that Yeshiva’s application raises from the state-law question that Yeshiva is properly not asking the Court to address. It is only that state-law question that arguably implicates the history of Yeshiva’s charter. The trial court that issued the injunction against Yeshiva devoted most of its ruling to the question whether Yeshiva qualifies for an exemption under the New York City Human Rights Law as a “religious corporation incorporated under the education law.” (I refer to this as a state-law […]
