Just a quick pointer to an interesting new article out by Kara Loewentheil at Yale, When Free Exercise Is a Burden: Protecting ‘Third Parties’ in Religious Accommodation Law.
Here’s her abstract (posted a few weeks ago before cert was granted):
As of November 2013, over 60 lawsuits have been filed under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”), challenging the contraceptive coverage requirement (“CCR”) of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more than half brought by for-profit employers with religious objections to providing insurance coverage for contraception. The conflict combines questions of the reach of the regulatory state, the nature and purpose of free exercise rights, women’s social and economic equality, and a lightning-rod political debate. No wonder then that these cases have produced a circuit split, and are now primed for a Supreme Court ruling, as two cert petitions in these cases were filed in September 2013. It is no surprise that these cases have produced such divergent results, because the problem lies not with the courts, but with the doctrine, which frames the conflict as being between the State and the religious objector. But as the CCR cases make clear, this relationship is often beside the point entirely. Rather, some religious accommodation cases regulate not only the relationship between the State and the objector, but a variety of conflicts and relationships between the religious objectors and various other rights-holders. The courts and the scholarship have occasionally noticed that such conflicts may exist but have not suggested any systematic way of thinking about or resolving them. To remedy this lacuna, I propose a framework for identifying and analyzing these under-theorized conflicts, elaborating on strands of concern for third parties in the doctrine that have never been fully fleshed out. I argue that once we identify the set of cases in which there are sufficiently weighty third-party interests at stake – whether practical or expressive – to merit deviation from the standard doctrinal framework, the question should be whether the State can provide a solution that respects all the rights in question. If so, it should have an obligation to do so. If not, the group with equality-implicating rights (again, whether practical or expressive) should “win” – with any “tie” going to the third parties, because the purpose of religious accommodation law is to protect the equality of religious objectors, not to privilege religion. The CCR suits present a paradigmatic example in which the State’s most important interest lies in its representation of the rights of third parties, and in which comprehensive solutions respecting all parties’ rights are possible but not doctrinally required, thus providing a clear illustration of why the framework I suggest would be an improvement in religious accommodation law. Nevertheless, there are also ways to better balance the interests involved through use of the existing doctrine, as the last part of this paper demonstrates.
