First Amendment – Cornell Law Review

Tag: First Amendment

Article

Protecting Dissent: The Freedom of Peaceful Assembly, Civil Disobedience, and Partial First Amendment Protection

Nick Robinson & Elly Page, Senior Legal Advisors at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law

Protesters in the United States frequently engage in peaceful unlawful conduct, or civil disobedience, such as blocking traffic or trespass. Often citing to the First Amendment, authorities will routinely decline to arrest or prosecute this nonviolent conduct or do so for lesser offenses than they could. This treatment, though, can vary considerably by location, issue,…

Apr 2022

Note

Finding Benevolent Neutrality in Land Use: RLUIPA’s Equal Terms Provision and the Human Flourishing Theory of Property

Hun Lee, B.A., Catholic University of Korea, 2016; J.D., Cornell Law School, 2021.

This Note will examine the circuit courts’ different approaches to interpreting the Equal Terms provision and suggest that the provision should be interpreted from the perspective of property law rather than the current judicial framework, which is inapt to resolve the inherent tension underlying RLUIPA and First Amendment jurisprudence. The Note will first identify this tension in Part I by surveying the history of RLUIPA in relation to the evolution of First Amendment jurisprudence. Part II will analyze the different approaches that circuit courts have taken to interpret RLUIPA’s Equal Terms provision, concluding that existing judicial approaches and the commentaries thereof call for an alternative approach informed by principles of property law. Part III will introduce a property theory based on the concept of human flourishing, arguing that the theory can provide an effective interpretive framework that may resolve issues regarding religious land use such as the interpretation of RLUIPA’s Equal Terms provision.

Sep 2021

Article

Disentangling Religion and Public Reason: An Alternative to the Ministerial Exception

Sabine Tsuruda, Assistant Professor, Queen’s University Faculty of Law.

This Article develops a theory of meaningful work to support an alternative to the ministerial exception that would permit religious organizations to hire like-minded employees, but only when doing so would not subvert the purposes of employment discrimination law. Such an “authenticity exception” can be implemented without state entanglement in religion by distinguishing the inherently religious issue of what makes work religious from the public issue of whether a limitation on someone’s rights is supported by public reasons—reasons that we could all accept as free and equal members of society. It then illustrates the authenticity exception through a similar exception in Canadian law and revisits ministerial exception cases to show how the authenticity exception better closes the gap between religious liberty and exempted discrimination.

Sep 2021

Article

The Corporate Privacy Proxy

Shaakirrah R. Sanders, Professor of Law, University of Idaho College of Law. J.D., Loyola University New Orleans College of Law (2001)

This Article contributes to the First Amendment corporate privacy debate by identifying the relevance of agriculture security legislation, or ag-gag laws. Ag-gag laws restrict methods used to gather and disseminate information about commercial food cultivation, production, and distribution—potentially creating a “right” to control or privatize nonproprietary information about animal and agribusinesses. Yet, corporate privacy rights…

May 2020