The 2021-22 Supreme Court term will be hard to beat, with four pro-religious freedom rulings, including the very important Kennedy decision, and the blockbuster overruling of Roe and Casey. That doesn’t mean that things won’t be happening on these fronts this coming term, but, as of now, the docket is not as full as last
The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs overruled Roe and Casey, and it is being rightly praised for doing so. But Dobbs did more than that. Hill Bites the Dust The Dobbs decision, in demonstrating the harm caused by Roe and its progeny, pointed out that abortion cases had distorted the law in multiple other areas.
The National Legal Foundation and several other organizations filed a friend of the court brief last week in the Wisconsin Supreme Court in support of parental rights to know when public schools are treating their children as transgender. The Madison school district published a policy—similar to the one in Montgomery County, Maryland, that NLF is
A Second Chance to Get It Right: 303 Creative at the Supreme Court It is not often that an issue comes before the Supreme Court twice within a space of four years, but that is exactly what has occurred in the same-sex marriage vendor cases. The first opportunity was in the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation. The
With what appears to be the best opportunity in almost 30 years to reverse Roe v. Wade, the pro-life forces are split on how the Court should do it. Some (most notably Prof. Robbie George of Princeton and Prof. John Finnis of Notre Dame) believe the Court should recognize that the due process and equal
The National Legal Foundation filed an amicus brief on behalf of itself and nine other organizations in the United States Supreme Court in Shurtleff v. Boston, which the Court will hear argued on January 18. Boston made one of three flagpoles in front of its city hall temporarily available for civic groups to fly their
Pro-life Cases The “big hitter” for this upcoming term is in the pro-life area: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Instead of nibbling around the edges of Roe and Casey, as the abortion cases in the Court for the last several decades have done, Dobbs goes for the heart, with Mississippi arguing that the viability
The Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor (2012) and Our Lady of Guadalupe (2020) embraced what Justice Alito described as the “so-called ministerial exception,” a doctrine that protects religious organizations from application of anti-discrimination laws when dealing with certain employees. Why “so-called”? Because the exemption covers more than just ministers or the top officials of a religious organization. But whom else? Certainly some
In March, The National Legal Foundation filed a “friend of the court” brief urging the Supreme Court to take a case (Carson v. Makin) that could end government discrimination against religious schools in the funding context. The case involves a Maine school program that pays the private school tuition for students who live in an area that lacks a public high school. The schools eligible to receive
Amy Barrett went on the Supreme Court with the blessing of originalists everywhere. Her academic writings as a Notre Dame professor and her judicial opinions from a few years on the Seventh Circuit all indicated she was firmly in the camp of those wedded to a textualist interpretation of the original documents as understood at