A philosophical battle is being waged for the soul of equal protection jurisprudence. One side sees discrimination as a comparative wrong occurring only where a law or policy fails to treat people as equals. The other side embraces a fundamentally noncomparative view that defines impermissible discrimination as a failure to treat each individual as she is entitled to be treated. This Article distinguishes between these conceptions, demonstrates why they are normatively distinct, and identifies specific and seemingly unrelated controversies in modern equal protection jurisprudence that are in fact manifestations of this single schism. The insights in this Article cannot resolve all of these doctrinal controversies, but they can reveal which controversies involve a philosophical muddling of the two competing conceptions and which will require the Supreme Court to choose.
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“Spiritual But Not Religious”: Rethinking the Legal Definition of Religion
Through the statutory mechanisms of RFRA and RLUIPA, Free Exercise jurisprudence has expanded the scope of religious protection. In the absence of a clear legal definition of religion, however, this protection has an unknown and biased reach. In particular, courts and legal scholars embody a misunderstanding of a burgeoning group of Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” excluding them from religious protection. This Note uses a recent case, which dismissed as nonreligious the beliefs of a plaintiff whose beliefs are paradigmatic of this growing cohort, to analyze how the law defines religion. It argues that while such belief systems reject the institutional characteristics of organized religion, they are sufficiently analogous to religious belief systems to deserve the same legal protection.
Judicial Capacity and Executive Power
The budget of the United States executive branch is roughly 500 times greater than that of the judicial branch. The executive workforce is more than fifty times greater. How do these enormous disparities affect the practical ability of courts to police executive power? Our judicial capacity model of Supreme Court decision making is the first attempt to take this question seriously. Briefly, in most executive power domains, the limits of judicial capacity create strong pressure on the Supreme Court to adopt hard-edged categorical rules, defer to the political process, or both. The reason is straightforward. In these domains, a departure from deferential or rule-based decisions would invite more litigation than the Court could handle without sacrificing minimum professional standards.
Our model explains why the Supreme Court has historically deferred to congressional delegations of power and avoided interfering with presidential administration, despite significant ideological temptations to intervene. It also explains the few areas of executive power in which the Court has been willing to act aggressively, as well as the one area in which the Court has employed indeterminate standards—as opposed to categorical rules—to invalidate government action. In so doing, the judicial capacity model clarifies when, if at all, it is sensible to urge the courts to constrain executive power in future cases. Finally, the judicial capacity model sheds light on some of the most significant issues in constitutional theory, including judicial competence, judicial independence, and the formalist-functionalist divide over separation of powers. For all of these reasons, judicial capacity deserves a central place on the agenda of executive power scholarship and constitutional theory more generally.