News from around the world. Curated by Mark McDowell. Posts do not constitute agreement or endorsement.
Click here to view full article at legalnewsline.com NEW YORK (Legal Newsline) — The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced April 26 that United Health Program of America Inc., a discount medical plan provider, and parent company Cost Containment Group Inc. (CCG), will pay $5.1 million after allegedly coercing…
Click here to view full article at www.mcall.com The Lehigh County seal (Contributed Photo / THE MORNING CALL) A group of 20 religious and civil rights organizations have filed a brief supporting a federal court’s ruling against Lehigh County, arguing the county seal is unconstitutional because features a cross .…
Click here to view full article at www.mcall.com The Lehigh County seal (Contributed Photo / THE MORNING CALL) A group of 20 religious and civil rights organizations have filed a brief supporting a federal court’s ruling against Lehigh County, arguing the county seal is unconstitutional because features a cross .…
Click here to view full article at evangelicalfocus.com European Court of Justice. In recent years, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the American Supreme Court have taken some decisions regarding the hiring of religious employees. For example, in 2012 a teacher laid off from a school linked to…
Click here to view full article at www.jdsupra.com Local governments in New York may regulate land use within their borders directly through their zoning codes and indirectly by adopting a variety of other statutes and regulations. There are, however, limits to their power. Municipalities, of course, must not discriminate on…
Click here to view full article at www.greeleytribune.com Kirkpatrick, R. Craig Recently, a series of letters have appeared on the editorial page of The Tribune addressing the issue of religious practice within our public square. One writer offered an opinion of those who argue that teaching the Bible should be…
Click here to view full article at www.lawandreligionuk.com Local elections apart, such a quiet week that on Saturday The Sun led with the story that a bloke was buying a suit… …and the newspaper both created and solved the Church Mystery: Grave of woman who died in 2011 mysteriously appears…
IICSA begins hearings on the Church of England, Ireland clears the way for a referendum on abortion and the President of the Supreme Court tackles the vexed question of niqabs in court. Lady Hale on religious dress The Supreme Court website has posted the text of Lady Hale’s Sultan Azlan…
It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when the debate about religious accommodation became the single most important topic in academic and legal debates about religious freedom, but two things are nearly certain: (1) it has now decisively displaced the issue of religious displays and religion in public as the preeminent…
I don’t know too much about the subject, but the description of this new book on the history of economics from Princeton University Press caught my attention. The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism , by Cambridge historian Tim Rogan, recounts the criticisms…
In Doe v. Greitens , (MO App., Oct. 3, 2017), a Missouri appellate court transferred to the state Supreme Court an appeal in a religious freedom challenge to the state’s abortion Informed Consent Law. Missouri’s law requires that a person seeking an abortion first receive a booklet containing specified information,…
Marriage and parochial fees, Gift Aid, Scientologists, hijabs, Brexit – and priority for Buddhist monks… Marriage certificates The Sunday Times reported (£) on New Year’s Eve that the Home Office is likely to approve the inclusion of mothers’ names on marriage certificates. According to the report, “A Home Office source…
Within Christian thought, natural law is typically seen as a Catholic concept, indeed, as a concept that distinguishes Catholicism from other Christian communions, like Orthodoxy and Protestantism–the former of which rejects natural law as too cerebral and the latter as too optimistic, given fallen human nature. A new collection of…
Primus generates less heat than some predicted The Scottish Episcopal Church has issued the following Press Release on the address of the Primus to the Anglican Communion Primates’ Meeting, [our emphasis]. Primus addresses the Anglican Communion Primates’ Meeting October 3, 2017 Primus addresses the Anglican Communion Primates’ Meeting on Scottish…
Australia is involved in a debate about whether same sex marriage should be introduced. The question is being put to the electors in the form of a voluntary postal survey, the question in which is simply: “Should the law be changed to allow same sex couples to marry?” The original…
Hostility to Catholicism is one of the hearty perennials of the study of law and religion in America. I have recently argued i n this piece that there was an important shift in the political rhetoric of the late 19th and early 20th century from accentuating anti-Catholic to anti-Christian themes.…
Is opposition on grounds of conscience to adoption by same-sex couples protected by equality legislation and the ECHR? That was the issue before the Tribunal in Mr R Page v NHS Trust Development Authority [2017] UKET 2302433/2016 . The background At the time of his appointment as a Non-Executive Director…
From the Law and Religion Forum: Here’s a new paper of mine, The Two Separations . Here’s the abstract: There is nothing self-evidently attractive about separation — whether of church and state or anything else — as a model for individual or collective life. Pursuing separation is not like pursuing…
Two pieces in the Australian online forum “The Conversation” today make misleading statements about the possible impacts of the recognition of same-sex marriage in Australia, and warrant some response. One article suggests that there is no doubt that churches will still be able to decline to solemnise same-sex marriages. The…
The Northern Territory government has released a discussion paper called Modernisation of the Anti-Discrimination Act (Sept 2017). It invites comments by 3 December 2017. You can almost get the tone of the paper from the title! After all, who in this fast-changing age could oppose anything called “modernisation”? But there…
In Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. v. County of Lehigh , (ED PA, Sept. 28, 2017), a Pennsylvania federal district court held that a large, central Latin cross in the seal and flag of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania violate the Establishment Clause under the Lemon test and the endorsement test. However…
In The Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of South Carolina v. The Episcopal Church, (SC Sup. Ct., Aug. 2, 2017), the 5-member South Carolina Supreme Court in 5 separate opinions spanning 77 pages resolved a property dispute that arose after a split in the Episcopal Church in South Carolina.…
In Nagy v. Hungary, (ECHR, Sept. 14, 2017), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, by a vote of 10-7, upheld the exclusive jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts over contractual disputes that are matters of ecclesiastical law. In the case, a pastor in the Reformed Church of Hungary…
Until the modern period the integration of church (or other religion) and state (or political life) had been taken for granted. The political order was always tied to an official religion in Christian Europe, pre-Christian Europe, and in the Arabic world. But from the eighteenth century onwards, some European states…
A fe excepts rom the Law and Religion Blog UK’s roundup: Doug Chaplin: Living comfortably: the fiction of a stipend? which Gary Alderson conveniently summarizes as “a blog post on the recent press reports that Church of England stipends are enough to live on basically pointing out they are, as…