Religious rights continue to garner attention from Supreme Court, with likely impacts on campus

Abstract

In recent years, a significant number of religious freedom cases have made their way to the Supreme Court. And individuals asserting religious rights have found a welcoming audience in a majority of the Supreme Court justices. As a result, the legal constructs under which religious issues have been evaluated for years cannot be relied upon. For many years, public institutions facing religious freedom issues had strong arguments when choosing an institutional priority over an individual religious right. The institution could assert that it would risk violating the Establishment Clause by appearing to favor religion by allowing an individual to invoke religion in certain circumstances. For example, in some circumstances, an institution might have precluded a student speaker at an event from making religious statements on those grounds — doing so now is more complicated.