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DeCoste on Bruker v. Marcovitz

By Lawrence Solum

Frederick C. DeCoste (Faculty of Law, University of Alberta) has posted Caesar's Faith: Limited Government and Freedom of Religion in Bruker v. Marcovitz (Dalhousie Law Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 153-176, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The Supreme Court of Canada has long pursued the view that our law is somehow an expression and repository of what it terms "Canada's fundatmental values." In Bruker v. Marcovitz -- a case that concerned the enforceability of a promise by a divorcing Jewish husband to provide his wife Get, a religious divorce -- the Court added to the catalogue of these judicially decreed and enforced values one concerning religion, namely, the protection of Canadians against the arbitary disadvanagtes of their religions. This comment argues that the Court's judgment in this regard constitutes a fundamental threat to religious liberty inasmuch as it subordinates religious belief and practice to state values by making the legal acceptability of the former turn on their conformity to the latter.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 01, 2010 (boomark / email).