Daily Archives: April 15, 2010

ADF Attorney Douglas Napier appeared on KARN with Dave Elswick to discuss this: Ark. school district: All fliers OK…except ‘church-related’ ones | The mp3 runs just under 7 minutes.

AFP: “US First Lady Michelle Obama Thursday said she favored diversity on the nation’s top court, wading into risky political waters as her husband weighs his second pick to the bench.”

Blog of LegalTimes: “Breyer and Justice Clarence Thomas (at left) were asked about the Court’s shrunken docket at the Court’s annual budget hearing before the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on financial services and general government.”

“White House officials say President Barack Obama still will recognize a National Day of Prayer after a federal judge’s ruling the day is unconstitutional.”

On Top Mag (“gay advocacy website”): “Gay marriage in Portugal is in the hands of President Anibal Cavaco Silva after the country’s Constitutional Court OK’d the bill last week. Portugal’s Socialist-controlled Parliament, led by Prime Minister Jose Socrates, approved the bill that grants gay and lesbian couples all the rights and obligations of marriage except adoption on February 11.”

Illinois Family Institute: “Rev. Senator James Meeks (D-Chicago) sponsored and passed the bi-partisan school vouchers legislation (SB 2494) that now moves to the Illinois House. This bill would enable 22,000 Chicago elementary students who attend the city’s 49 worst performing schools to attend private schools.”

Christian Post: “Launched Wednesday, Alliance Defense Fund’s Church Project provides legal information to pastors and ministry leaders on how to defend their religious freedom in America as well as practical guidelines on issues such as public funding and hiring policies. ‘Pastors and churches shouldn’t live in fear of being punished or penalized by the government. That’s exactly why the Constitution protects religious freedom,’ says ADF senior counsel [Kevin Theriot], who heads the Church Project.”

New York Times, The Lede: “The leaders of Britain’s three largest parties face-off for the next 90 minutes live on British television starting at 8:30 p.m. local time (3:30 p.m. ET). Readers in the United Kingdom can watch live video of the debate on the Web site of the British broadcaster ITV.” | Live at C-SPAN3.

Balkan Insight: “EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele has confirmed that he sent a letter to Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski with his concerns regarding the content of the country’s new anti-discrimination law. Speaking to journalists in Brussels late on Wednesday, Fuele said he still thinks that protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation should have been included in the law.”

The Christian Institute: “Hundreds of parliamentary candidates are set to be quizzed about their stances on moral issues in a series of hustings being held by churches across the country. More than 170 churches have signed up to hold hustings, meaning that over a quarter of constituencies will now be involved.”

Fox11AZ.com: “The bill would put into law a current requirement set by Department of Health Services rules for confidential reports by abortion providers on individual abortions and circumstances without names of the women involved. The bill also requires court reports on how many times judges bypass parental consent requirements.”

Blog of the Legal Times: “President Barack Obama yesterday nominated John Gibney Jr., a partner with ThompsonMcMullan in Richmond, Va., for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.”

Catholic Culture: “Responding to the controversial statement by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone that homosexuality played an important role in the Church’s sex-abuse crisis, Father Marcus Stock said that ‘there is no empirical data which concludes that sexual orientation is connected to child sexual abuse.’ . . . In the US, more than 80% of the complaints have involved same-sex relations.”

See also: Is the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church a “gay” scandal?

Media like snake oil salesmen in reporting “gay” role in Church sex abuse scandal, Vatican finally confronts

USA Today has posted a report here. The law school rankings are here.

STLToday.com: “The bill requires a doctor or qualified professional to provide a woman seeking an abortion with information about the associated health hazards and a medical description of the procedure. The bill also offers the woman an opportunity to view an ultrasound 24 hours before receiving an abortion . . . ”

Blog of the Legal Times: “Neither SCOTUSblog founder Thomas Goldstein nor Jenner & Block associate Lindsay Harrison expect President Barack Obama to engage in a major political battle with Republicans over his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Speaking at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law on a Wednesday panel discussion, both lawyers predicted Solicitor General Elena Kagan would be nominated . . . ”

Christian Newswire: “Today Governor Mike Huckabee announced his support for SB 529 in a message that is going out to Georgia constituents asking for their support for SB 529. Governor Huckabee noted the importance of this bill, ‘SB 529 is a simple bill that prevents a woman from being forced to have an abortion against her will and prohibits the use of abortion as a means of race or gender discrimination. I’m asking you to support SB 529 and to ask your representative to support SB 529.’”

“Kansas Gov. Mark Parkinson has vetoed a bill that rewrites the state’s laws regulating late-term abortions.”

EurActiv: “National administrations and the European Commission are ignoring the regions’ new right to shape EU decisions under the Lisbon Treaty, Mayor of Vienna Michael Häupl told EurActiv in an interview . . . The treaty, he stressed, was designed to reinforce the democratic input of national and regional parliaments in EU decision-making, via the so-called subsidiarity principle. But as a result of national intransigence, he claims powerful regions such as Vienna are losing out and must start to make their voices heard, pressuring national governments into fully recognising these changes.”

Seoul Times: “Therefore, you have two important dimensions in southern Thailand. One, and of course the most important component at the moment, is the ongoing anti-Buddhist campaign whereby Islamists desire a pure Islamic state. The other important component is that if the Thai military loses control and if Buddhists continue to flee southern parts of Thailand, then the Islamic internationalization of southern Thailand will become a regional issue and this notably applies to Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.”

Montreal Gazette: “Insisting his proposal doesn’t violate Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s stated opposition to reopening the abortion debate, a Conservative backbencher has introduced a private member’s bill that would make it illegal to ‘coerce’ a woman to have an abortion . . . ‘The government will not support the bill,’ Harper spokesman Andrew MacDougall said in an interview. ‘Our Conservative government will not initiate or support any legislation that opens the abortion debate.’”

FRC: “This technology is a further step toward tampering with the very essence of humanity, and demonstrates not just contempt for human life itself – all the embryos in this experiment were destroyed for science – but a profoundly dangerous and arrogant belief that we can tamper with the genetic makeup of our fellow human beings.”

“The House ethics committee has drafted rules that for the first time would define gay married couples as ‘spouses’ for the purposes of filling out their annual Congressional financial disclosure forms.”

FRC: “Today Family Research Council President Tony Perkins released the following statement regarding a decision by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, commonly called the Ethics Committee, to violate the Defense of Marriage Act by recognizing same-sex ‘marriage’ in newly released financial disclosure forms . . . ‘This demonstrates once again why the approval ratings of Congress are at historic lows.’ The American people are fed up with a Congress which refuses to apply laws to itself t hat apply to everyone else.”

AP: “An AIDS advocacy group is bringing labor complaints against nine porn talent agencies for promoting actors willing to have unprotected sex on camera.”

“Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund are urging President Obama to appeal a federal judge’s decision in Wisconsin that struck down a federal statute that sets a day for the National Day of Prayer . . . ”

“Ohio Revised Code § 2907.31(D)(1), which criminalizes sending juveniles material that is harmful to them . . . ”

CCFON: “Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and several high-profile Christian ‘victims’ who say that have lost confidence in the independence of the judiciary in England, will urge senior judges to stand down from future Court of Appeal hearings because of “disturbing” and “dangerous” rulings they issued in recent religious discrimination cases . . . ”

Miami Herald: “After weeks of protest and a deluge of messages, Gov. Charlie Crist on Thursday vetoed a bill that would link teacher pay to student test scores and wipe out tenure for new teachers.”

“A federal district court in Wisconsin has issued a decision declaring the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional. ”

LifeSiteNews: “With Tennessee having become the first state to opt-out of the abortion funding mandate in the national health care reform, several more states are poised to follow suit this year, with many more to follow when their legislatures again reconvene. Americans United for Life (AUL), a pro-life public-interest law and policy organization in the United States, developed draft legislation for states to exploit a provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Sec. 1303), which explicitly allows the state-run health insurance exchanges to prohibit public funds from subsidizing health insurance companies that offer co-pays for abortion . . . ”

LifeSiteNews: “The University of Detroit Mercy, a Jesuit Catholic institution, has come under fire for failing to remove links to pro-abortion groups on its website, as well as for keeping a renowned pro-abortion, pro-same-sex “marriage” nun on its Board of Trustees.”

LifeNews: “A new study out this week by the leading British medical journal shows maternal mortality rates have been significantly overestimated by United Nations (UN) agencies. The Lancet reports that maternal deaths worldwide in 2008 totaled 342,900 rather than the 500,000+ used by the World Bank, World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in recent years . . . ”

Blog of the Legal Times: “A day before Goodwin Liu goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, senators traded barbs over whether the federal appellate nominee has provided them with enough information.”

Stephen Prothero writes at USA Today: “The core finding of Pew’s ‘Religion Among the Millennials’ report is that young Americans are ‘less religiously affiliated’ than their elders. In fact, one in four of Americans ages 18 to 29 do not affiliate with any particular religious group. This is not entirely unexpected, since it is a sociological truism that young people cultivate some distance from the religious institutions of their parents, only to return to those institutions as they marry, raise children and slouch toward retirement. According to Pew, however, ‘Millennials are significantly more unaffiliated than members of Generation X were at a comparable point in their life cycle … and twice as unaffiliated as Baby Boomers were as young adults.’ This is an important finding because it provides strong evidence for the loosening of religion’s grip on American life. Or does it?”

Robert W. Patterson writing in The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy: “Indeed, nothing separates the professional class of Republican thinkers and players from the voting public more than the issue of how the party should position itself vis-à-vis the ‘social issues.’ As much as the media like to portray the GOP as beholden to the Religious Right, the reality is that Republican elites, with rare exceptions, are more beholden to economic conservatives and foreign-policy hawks than to social conservatives. Paraphrasing Jeffrey Bell’s observation in The Weekly Standard, Republican elites would rather talk about anything but social issues . . . A Washington Post poll conducted last November found that 66 percent of Republicans consider themselves ‘conservative’ on social issues; nearly half of this subset (or 32 percent of the sample) consider themselves ‘very conservative’ on social issues. Reviewing a Pew Research Center study, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam claim that staunch social-conservative convictions stand at the core of GOP popular support . . .”

Evangelical Examiner: “In October 2009 . . . a Pulaski County Special School District (Arkansas) [student] and her mother requested permission to distribute fliers inviting friends and classmates to a church-sponsored swimming event . . . Sherwood Elementary School’s principal . . . said that the director of elementary education decided that the fliers could not be distributed because they were ‘church-related’ . . . Because of the resistance by the school district, a Federal lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by the Alliance Defense Fund. Their attorneys filed suit against the Pulaski County Special School District on behalf of a student and her mother.” | ADF News Release: Ark. school district: All fliers OK…except ‘church-related’ ones

OneNewsNow: “Five universities and colleges in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are being urged to revise their policies that may restrict the free-speech rights of Christian students . . . ADF attorney Jeremy Tedesco tells OneNewsNow that the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2007, in another ADF case, that such restrictions are unconstitutional because they gave officials ‘an easy-to-abuse enforcement mechanism to punish any speech that they may decide is “offensive.”‘ That, says the attorney, presents a dilemma for students.”

Tara Parker-Pope writes at the NY Times: “Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married . . . But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced. All of which suggests that while Farr’s exploration into the conjugal condition pointed us in the right direction, it exaggerated the importance of the institution of marriage and underestimated the quality and character of the marriage itself . . . ”

Joan Biskupic writes at USA Today: “Larry Stickney speaks passionately as he tries to explain why the names of people who signed a 2009 Washington state ballot measure against gay rights should be kept secret . . .”

White House: “Today, President Obama nominated Edward C. DuMont to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. DuMont is currently a partner in the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr (WilmerHale).”

Eugene Volokh writing at the Volokh Conspiracy: Ed DuMont Nominated for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

OneNewsNow: “The constitutional amendment has to do with placement of foster children, and attorney [Byron Babione] with Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) reports that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging Act 1, a measure passed by voters in 2008. (See earlier story) ‘The ACLU is representing various persons — same-sex couples — to sue to have stricken down a state law that makes sure that foster children are placed in homes where there’s a married mother and father,’ he explains.”

Washington Times: “Mike Adams isn’t exactly the most popular guy on campus. He’s an outspoken conservative Christian who cried discrimination when his department refused to promote him to full professor and slapped the University of North Carolina at Wilmington with a lawsuit . . . The Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona-based organization of Christian lawyers, plans to appeal the ruling to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Pew Forum (RNS): “The case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, pits a campus chapter of a Christian legal group against the Hastings College of the Law and its 20-year-old nondiscrimination policy. ‘Our main argument is that Christian student groups shouldn’t be forced to deny their faith in order to receive equal treatment on campus,’ said [Gregory Baylor], senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, which is helping represent the CLS chapter before the high court.”

George F. Will writes at the Washington Post: “So conservatives should rethink their rhetoric about ‘judicial activism.’ The proper question is: Will the nominee be actively enough engaged in protecting liberty from depredations perpetrated by popular sovereignty?”

Gregory Kane writes at the Washington Examiner: “I got the most pleasant of surprises at a funeral. The service had reached the point where an Old Testament passage had to be read. The one selected was the 23rd Psalm. As the woman reading it pronounced each word, I found myself following along. I didn’t remember each and every sentence, but I remembered most of it . . . ”

Religion Clause Blog: “ADF’s Pulpit Initiative has been integrated into the broader Church Project. A new website set up for the project is aimed at educating pastors and religious leaders, and furnishing them with resources to defend their religious freedom . . .”

Hartford Courant: “A First Amendment battle might be looming after the board of education’s decision Tuesday night to hold high school graduations at First Cathedral in Bloomfield.”

SCOTUS Blog: “The cable network, C-SPAN, reported Monday that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., had turned down a request to provide same-day release of the audiotapes of the argument set for 10 a.m. Monday in a students’ rights case, Christian Legal Society v. Newton (08-1371).”

AP: “Activists have protested a Turkish minister for her recent remark that homosexuality is a disease.”

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the Pulaski County Special School District on behalf of a student and her mother, who were both prohibited from participating in Sherwood Elementary School’s literature distribution program because their fliers were “church-related.”

At EPPC, Michael Cromartie served as the moderator for this panel: Philip Jenkins, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania State University and Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion.

CNET: “In a brief filed Tuesday afternoon, the coalition says a search warrant signed by a judge is necessary before the FBI or other police agencies can read the contents of Yahoo Mail messages–a position that puts those companies directly at odds with the Obama administration.”

Jan LaRue writes at the American Thinker: “When Sen. Chuck Schumer says, ‘It’s just about a certainty that the president will nominate someone in the mainstream,’ think left bank. The refrains ‘mainstream,’ ‘moderate,’ and ‘balance’ will be repeated ad nauseam because big lies and irrelevancies take on the appearance of truth when hammered relentlessly.”

Deal W. Hudson writing at the Catholic Advocate: “Just as all student groups have the right to associate with people who share common beliefs and interests, Christian student groups have the right to be Christian student groups,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Gregory S. Baylor. ‘Requiring leaders of a Christian club to live by a Christian code of conduct is no different than an environmentalist club requiring its leaders not to be lumberjacks.’ For Alan Sears, president of the Alliance Defense Fund, the Hastings’ decision will have historic ramifications for religious freedom in our nation. As Sears wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner: ‘As Christian beliefs stand in ever starker contrast to the campus culture, it has become academic de rigueur to punish the free association of Christian students and the free expression of their ideas on campus.’”

Tuan Samahon, Impeachment as Judicial Selection? (September 17, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1474773

“This Article examines the phenomenon of impeachment as judicial selection through Professors Tushnet’s and Balkin’s framework of ‘constitutional hardball.’ In the case of impeachment as judicial selection, Congress plays constitutional hardball by claiming that it is an appropriate tool for political control and a fraternal twin to the modern appointments process. This Article details prior episodes of impeachment as judicial selection. It explains why the idea of impeachment as an ex post selection tool proves so tempting. It then considers those legal arguments that justify and contest the claims of this variety of constitutional hardball. Further, the Article makes the case that, contrary to conventional wisdom, constitutional and political developments make impeachment a closer alternative to transformative, affirmative selection than in the past. This relative feasibility heightens the fool’s gold allure of impeachment as judicial selection. Actually impeaching for judicial selection, however, would yield results that many would consider as untoward and unacceptably intruding on judicial independence and the rule of law. This Article briefly considers those significant costs.”

The Times and Democrat: “South Carolina’s centuries-old gambling laws would be revised to legalize charity raffles and friendly poker games in residents’ homes under legislation given tentative approval Tuesday. A House subcommittee advanced the proposals 4-1, with legislators saying it’s time to fix the 1802 antigambling laws enforced haphazardly across the state.”

Maryland’s Conscience Clause: Leaving a Woman’s Right to a Health Care Provider’s Choice
Maria Cirincione, 13 J. Health Care L. & Pol’y 171 (2010)

“Part I of this Comment begins with a brief history of federal and state conscience legislation in the United States and continues with a discussion of patient and provider rights in the context of relevant constitutional interpretations and physician responsibilities grounded in principles of medical ethics and Maryland case law. Part II provides a summary of general scholarly discourse on the conflict between patient and provider rights. Part III argues that Maryland’s conscience legislation must be amended in three fundamental ways in order to prevent health care providers from being able to deny care to women in need of emergency contraception. Specifically, the Maryland legislature should (1) replace the phrase termination of pregnancy with abortion, (2) include a requirement that providers inform patients about emergency contraception as a treatment option if it is medically indicated, and (3) require a treating provider to either administer emergency contraception or to refer the patient to another provider who is willing to provide emergency contraception within the medically indicated time limit.”

National Law Journal: “Justice Department lawyers, faced with defending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ at trial while President Obama continues to call for the law’s repeal, have turned up the heat in recent court filings by attacking the standing of an alleged victim in the case.”

Confusing Plain Language: The Compelling But Counterintuitive Need for Adoption by a Biological Parent
Ashley L. Driver, 63 Ark. L. Rev. 139 (2010)

“Adoption is often defined as a process that creates a relationship between an adoptive parent and a child who are not biologically related. Under this definition, adoption creates the relationship of parent and child between two people who are necessarily unrelated. This definition compels the inference that the parent-child relationship inherently exists between a biological parent and his or her child. Thus, the adoption of a child by his or her biological parent appears to be both counterintuitive and unnecessary. This definition, however, mistakenly equates biology with parental rights, and one must first be familiar with the modern law of adoption before the motivations for and the repercussions of allowing a biological parent to adopt his or her own child can be understood.”

Justice John Paul Stevens as Abortion-Rights Strategist
Linda Greenhouse, 43 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 749 (2010)

“During his thirty-four years on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens has played a significant but largely unrecognized role in the evolution of the Court’s abortion jurisprudence. For example, his behind-the-scenes intervention in 1992 was critical to the outcome in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. In Casey, a majority of the Court came together against all expectations to speak with one voice for the preservation of the constitutional right to abortion. Such a role appeared most unlikely at the time of Justice Stevens’s arrival on the Court in December 1975–he was the first Justice named to the Court since the decision in Roe v. Wade nearly three years earlier–or during the first years of his tenure. The abortion issue had not previously engaged him. In 1985, he observed to his colleagues that he did not know how he himself might have voted had he been on the Court in 1973. But as the abortion issue grew increasingly politicized, and as the Supreme Court found itself enlisted as a prime scene of the conflict over abortion, the middle ground on which Justice Stevens might well have felt comfortable disappeared. When the time came to choose sides, he chose to embrace the full scope of the right to abortion. He became both an indispensable ally to Justice Harry A. Blackmun and a strategic advocate who won the trust of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, without whose vote the right to abortion would not have been preserved. The purpose of this Article is to trace Justice Stevens’s evolution and to give him his due as an important strategist of abortion rights.”

H.B. 189: Teaching Contraception in Utah’s Abstinence-Only Public Schools
Ian Atzet, 12 J. L. & Fam. Stud. 273 (2010)

“Voting against H.R. 189 would likely result from the Utah Legislature mistakenly prioritizing the inculcation of community values above education that would reverse STD infection trends. To support this assertion, this paper analyzes the changes proposed by H.R. 189 and their potential impact. Section II outlines the current statute, § 53A-13-101 of the Utah Code, and the resulting curriculum; Section III presents potential problems with sex education curricula; Section IV discusses the changes H.R. 189 will statutorily impose; and Section V presents arguments in favor of enacting H.R. 189.”

Being FAIR to Religion: Rumsfeld v. FAIR’s Impact on the Associational Rights of Religious Organizations
Stuart McPhail, 3 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 221 (2009)

“This Essay explores the possible impacts of FAIR on the associational rights of religious groups. Part I discusses the background constitutional protections for both religious and secular associations prior to Rumsfeld v. FAIR. Part II discusses how FAIR has altered the doctrine of expressive association and why it likely impacts religious organizations after Employment Division v. Smith. Part III argues that FAIR’s limitations should be applied against religious organizations, whether or not the church autonomy doctrine survived Smith.”

The Best of a Bad Lot: Compromise and Hybrid Religious Exemptions
123 Harv. L. Rev. 1494

“[T]his Note suggests cabining the hybrid rights doctrine to claims and fact patterns that very closely resemble those discussed by the Smith Court. This approach would allow the lower courts to respect their subordinate role in the judiciary by giving meaning to both Smith’s holding and its hybrid rights language, while also preventing the hybrid rights doctrine from compromising the Establishment and Equal Protection Clauses in favor of the Free Exercise Clause. Part II lays out the Court’s opinion in Smith and briefly notes the academic criticism and legislative responses it provoked. Part III discusses the various approaches adopted by the lower courts since Smith and their respective shortcomings. Part IV proposes a new alternative, and Part V briefly concludes.”

“Eighty embryos were created but destroyed after eight days. Lead researcher Professor Doug Turnbull said: ‘What we’ve done is like changing the battery on a laptop.’”

Confession and Mandatory Child Abuse Reporting: A New Take on the Constitutionality of Abrogating the Priest-Penitent Privilege
Samuel G. Brooks, 24 BYU J. Pub. L. 117 (2009)

“This Comment proceeds in three parts. Part I summarizes the history and justification of confidentiality privileges and the constitutional basis of the priest-penitent privilege. Part II reviews the U.S. Supreme Court’s free-exercise jurisprudence and identifies the constitutional implications of reporting statutes that abrogate the priest-penitent privilege. Part III argues that broad abrogation of the privilege unconstitutionally burdens free exercise of religion and also implicates the constitutional rights to freedom from compelled speech, freedom of association, and privacy. I conclude that, when subjected to strict scrutiny, any wholesale abrogation of the priest-penitent privilege infringes the free exercise rights of certain clergy members, particularly Catholic priests. While broad mandatory reporting statutes probably serve compelling state interests, they are not narrowly tailored to meet that interest. Rather, these statutes could be narrowly drawn to further the states’ interests without burdening free exercise rights.”

Righteous Torts: Pleasant Glade Assembly of God v. Schubert and the Free Exercise Defense in Texas
William Drabble, 62 Baylor L. Rev. 267 (2010)

“This Note will critically analyze the Texas Supreme Court’s decision in Schubert and will suggest a method of applying tort laws to religious conduct consistent with the First Amendment. Part II begins with a review of the U.S. Supreme Court’s evolving free exercise jurisprudence. Part III discusses the use of the Free Exercise Clause as a defense to tort causes of action and how the Texas courts have applied the defense. Part IV analyzes Schubert and suggests a method of applying tort laws to religiously motivated conduct while protecting the tortfeasors’ freedom of belief.”

Julian Lonbay, The Role of Practice in Legal Education in England and Wales (April 14, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1589304

“This paper sets out the basic details of the framework within which legal education is delivered in England and Wales. It assesses the role that ‘legal practice’ plays during the student’s law school experience.”

The Heritage Foundation, Foundry Blog: “If more taxpayers continue to drop off the tax rolls, we will soon pass the dangerous tipping point where more than half of taxpayers are non-payers. The individual income tax is the main revenue raiser for federal government. Passing the point where less than half of taxpayers pay it would mean a majority of voters could vote themselves more and more government benefits without incurring any of the costs. In this unstable situation, politicians would have no incentive to restrain government spending since they could garner more votes by increasing it.”