(DOWNLOAD) "Commerce in Religion (Symposium: The Supreme Court's Hands-off Approach to Religious Doctrine)" by Notre Dame Law Review # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Commerce in Religion (Symposium: The Supreme Court's Hands-off Approach to Religious Doctrine)
- Author : Notre Dame Law Review
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 314 KB
Description
INTRODUCTION Given the multifarious debates about the definition of religion among philosophers, sociologists, and even adherents of religion, (1) it should come as no surprise that secular courts have engaged in advanced acrobatics in the attempt to avoid determining religion's limits and bounds. A central aim of what Kent Greenawalt and others have termed the U.S. Supreme Court's hands-off approach to religious liberty (2) is to avert the problems that might arise if nonreligious courts were to choose among disparate accounts of church doctrine. (3) Similarly fraught questions are posed when a court attempts to decide whether or not a particular set of beliefs and practices counts as religious. Although the law does, in a number of areas, make implicit judgments about what fits within the rubric of religion, the Supreme Court has notoriously refrained from providing a comprehensive account of what "religion" means within the context of the First Amendment. (4) The conception of religion that has emerged from the European Court of Human Rights' (ECHR) adjudication of religious liberty claims under the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention) (5) partakes of a similarly capacious imprecision. (6) Although the ECHR is charged with the implementation of a treaty, not a Constitution, the European Convention itself has, during the course of its history, assumed increasingly constitutional status within Europe. (7) A variety of factors, including the development of an evolving individual rights jurisprudence and the internalization of ECHR protections into member countries' domestic legal regimes, have contributed to this transformation. (8) On account of the European Convention regime's quasi-constitutional status, the religious jurisprudence of the ECHR provides an instructive comparison to that of the U.S. Supreme Court.