The Petrie-Flom Center is excited to announce our affiliated researchers for the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) and our new project, Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience (PULSE). Through research, writing, workshops, and other projects, POPLAR and PULSE affiliated researchers will provide expertise and a range of perspectives on psychedelics law and policy. We look forward to learning from them and sharing their insights with our audiences.
Tag: religion
The Ever-Expanding Right to Refuse to Provide Healthcare
For the past decade, a blockbuster religion law case has been a feature of every Supreme Court term. The Court dramatically eased the ability of employers to claim religious exemptions. It overturned long-standing Establishment Clause precedent. And it revolutionized Free Exercise Clause doctrine to favor objectors to public health measures and antidiscrimination laws. With no religious liberty claim on the docket, the 2023-24 term promised to be the exception.
Nevertheless, in a pair of abortion cases, the Court took the opportunity to broadly interpret federal conscience law to override patients’ rights to emergency care. The first, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), challenged the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the abortion pill. The second, Moyle v. United States, involved the conflict between state abortion bans and the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a federal law that requires life- and health-saving care, including abortion, in emergency departments. Neither seemed to implicate the Church Amendment of 1973, which allows individual providers and institutions to refuse to perform or participate in abortion for religious or moral reasons.
The Federal Judiciary Is Broken — But Not for the Reason You Think
By Jennifer Bard
Recent events, including the discovery that Justice Thomas has been accepting luxury vacations from and selling real estate to a billionaire, and the Fifth Circuit’s finding in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA that federal courts have the power to modify the conditions under which the FDA can approve a drug, may seem separate. But they’re not. Both involve a threat to our constitutional government and both highlight the need to shield all federal decision makers from entities with billions at stake and a fiduciary interest in increasing the value of their company for the benefit of shareholders. And while issues of influence affecting Supreme Court Justices attract the most attention, the factors that make Justices targets extend across the entire federal judiciary.
Employers and the Future of Public Health
By Sharona Hoffman
As state and federal public health authority erodes, employers may increasingly find themselves playing a central role in promoting public health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many employers either incentivized or required employees and customers to be vaccinated and/or masked even in the absence of federal and state mandates. In the future, they may frequently take the lead in implementing public health measures.
The Supreme Court Threatens to Undermine Vaccination Decisions Entrusted to the States
By Donna Gitter
In 2021, the Supreme Court articulated in Tandon v. Newsom a legal principle that threatens to upend over a century of legal precedent recognizing the authority of state governments to ensure public health by mandating vaccines.
The ruling lays the groundwork for courts to force states to include religious exemptions to mandatory vaccines whenever they include secular exemptions, such as medical ones.
The Most Dangerous Branch: A Review of the Supreme Court’s 2021-2022 Term
By Gregory Curfman
Throughout its October 2021-2022 term, the Supreme Court has shown no evidence of judicial restraint, dispelling any remaining illusions that the judiciary is, in the words of Alexander Bickel and Alexander Hamilton, “The Least Dangerous Branch.”
The Bind We’re in — And How the Supreme Court Put Us There
By Jennifer Bard
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages into its third year of global death and destruction, the Supreme Court of the United States has effectively thwarted every measure by federal or state government to implement the public health tools that for hundreds of years have been used to stop the spread of contagious disease. They have done so by operationalizing what were previously fringe and relatively harmless academic views in ways that extend their powers beyond any previous boundaries. These include, but are not limited to, extending the protection for religious exercise past any previously imagined, and limiting Congressional authority to respond to emergencies by imposing impossible standards of specificity on its delegation of authority to the agencies which it creates, funds, and directly oversees.
In so doing, the Court has not only undermined the health of the nation, and pushed millions of people into unnecessary long-term disability, which our fragmented health care and social security system is unequipped to handle. It has also threatened our national security by infecting what is already more than half of the children in the country with a virus that has the potential to damage every organ in their bodies, from heart to brain.
5 Questions About COVID-19 and Religious Exemptions
By Chloe Reichel
On February 26th, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a shadow docket decision that could foretell sweeping limitations for public health measures, both within and outside the COVID-19 pandemic context.
The Court’s ruling in the case, Gateway City Church v. Newsom, blocked a county-level ban on church services, despite the fact that the ban applied across the board to all indoor gatherings. This religious exceptionalism is emerging as a key trend in recent Supreme Court decisions, particularly those related to COVID-19 restrictions.
To better understand what these rulings might mean for public health, free exercise of religion, the future of the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential vaccine mandates, I spoke with Professor Elizabeth Sepper, an expert in religious liberty, health law, and equality at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.
What the Study of Religion Can Teach Us About Psychedelics
By Sam S.B. Shonkoff
If there is one thing that the critical study of religion unveils, it is that every enchanting and revelatory movement in human history — without exception, no matter how luminous the auras — is nonetheless human.
Psychedelics are no exception.
These substances are making a lot of brain scientists and policymakers talk about mysticism. And how could they not? A rapidly expanding body of data confirms that historically sacramental elements can induce altered states of consciousness with significant healing powers.
In contrast to today’s more conventional psychopharmacological techniques, which require regular doses to maintain chemical changes in the body, it appears that psychedelic medicines operate precisely by means of transformative experiences, the effects of which can last for months, if not years. Scholars and psychonauts alike can hardly account for these phenomena without recourse to the lexicon of religious studies.
And yet, strangely, scholars of religion have been largely absent from this discourse.
Egg Freezing Permissible in Islam, According to Egypt’s Dar Al-Ifta
By Sarah Alawi
Dar Al-Ifta, Egypt’s Islamic body, issued a statement earlier this month on the legality of egg freezing under Islamic law following a controversial Facebook post by an Egyptian woman, Reem Mahana, on her decision to freeze her eggs.
Mahana said she froze her eggs for “the simple reason” that she wants to build a family when the time is right: “I cannot guarantee when exactly I will get married… I totally reject the idea of getting married to any man [only] to have a child.”