Academic

Gedicks on the Establishment Clause

By Lawrence Solum

Frederick Mark Gedicks (Brigham Young University - J. Reuben Clark Law School) has posted Indeterminacy and the Establishment Clause (Constitutional Commentary, 2009) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Prepared for a symposium on Kent Greenawalt, 2 Religion and the Constitution: Establishment and Fairness (Princeton, 2008), this essay responds to Professor Greenawalt's criticism of my argument in The Rhetoric of Church and State (Duke, 1995), that Establishment Clause doctrine is the incoherent residue of conflicting rhetorical discourses of religious communitarianism and secular individualism. Not only are the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause decisions inconsistent at the margins, but there is no identifiable core meaning that can account for these decisions. The essay concludes that, contra Greenawalt, the thesis of conflicting rhetorical discourses remains the most powerful explanation of the Court's doctrine in this area.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on December 26, 2008 (boomark / email).