The following is from Rick Garnett at Notre Dame Law School:

Thanks very much to Gordon for including me in this very rich and thoughtful discussion.  The care and civility with which the various questions raised in the Hobby Lobby case are being handled here at The Conglomerate is a model, and should be an inspiration, for all of us.

I had the chance, yesterday afternoon, to read the transcript of the oral arguments in the case.  The usual caveats apply:  it is difficult and dangerous to make confident predictions about the Court based on oral arguments.  That said, it appears that at least three justices are highly skeptical regarding Hobby Lobby’s RFRA claim and also that at least four justices are similarly skeptical -- as I think they should be -- with respect to the notions that (a) “corporations” or “businesses” are categorically excluded from RFRA’s protections; (b) that it would violate the Establishment Clause to accommodate Hobby Lobby; and (c) that the contraception-coverage provisions at issue do not “substantially burden” Hobby Lobby’s exercise of religion.

One thing that stood out, for me, in the argument (besides some of the justices’ maddening habit of so frequently interrupting counsel and each other as to make the arguments near useless) was Paul Clement’s exchange with Justice Kennedy about “the position and the rights of . . . the employees.”  In some places, it has been suggested that accommodating the religious-liberty rights of the employer would violate the religious liberty of an employee who did not share the employer’s religious beliefs.  (An example “close to home”:  some have argued that it would violate the religious freedom of Notre Dame faculty or students who do not accept Catholic teaching regarding the use of contraception to exempt Notre Dame from the contraception-coverage rules.)  In my view, this suggestion is not convincing -- it conflates state-imposed burdens and state coercion with the presumptive right of non-state institutions, including employers, to act in accord with a religious mission or character.  In any event, I don’t think Justice Kennedy was making this suggestion.  His concern seemed, instead, to be with accommodations that put the employees of some employers in a “disadvantageous position.”

Paul Clement was (sigh) interrupted by another justice before he was able to answer Justice Kennedy but it appeared to me that he wanted to make the point (and he did say something like this in conversation with Justices Sotomayor and Kagan) that we should not regard it as “imposing a burden on” or “disadvantaging” an employee to say that it was not lawful – because it violated RFRA – to require the employer to provide a benefit to that employee in the first place.  This is, of course, the “where’s the baseline?” point with which we law professors are so familiar.  (For more on this, take a look at this short essay I did for the Vanderbilt Law Review’s “En Banc” feature.)

Corporate Law, Employees, Hobby Lobby, Religion | Bookmark

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