Cert grants!

My previous post refers to the Supreme Court's grant of certiorari in two cases involving public Ten Commandments monuments. I'm quite interested in these cases--I teach a Religion & the Constitution class. I'm about to read the two Court of Appeals cases carefully, and I'll write something up about them later today. Friday, I'm going to talk about the cases on Joy Cardin's Wisconsin Public Radio show (on the "Ideas Network" stations, here). So if you're up between 6 and 7 am...

There is a second cert grant related to religion, Cutter v. Wilkinson. Here the question is the constitutionality of a federal statute--the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act--requiring accommodations for prisoners whose practice of religion is substantially burdened. Among the prisoners bringing the lawsuit are "a Wiccan witch, a Satanist, [and] a racial separatist who is an ordained minister of the Christian Identity Church." The law resembles to some extent the broader Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the Court held could not be applied to the states because Congress lacked power to pass that law under the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The newer law relies on Congress's spending power: state institutions must accept the requirement to accommodate religion as a condition if they want to receive federal funding. The challenge to this law is based on the Establishment Clause. In City of Boerne v. Flores, the 1997 case that struck down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Justice Stevens wrote a concurring opinion to say that that statute violated the Establishment Clause. But Stevens is the strongest separationist on today's Court, so it is hard to predict how well an argument about separation of church and state will work on the other Justices, but I note that recent Establishment Clause cases--such as Zelman and Locke--have reflected federalism values. I think in this new case, the majority may find it appealing to free the states from prisoner litigation and rely on their own judgment about how much to accommodate religion.

Then there were a couple of cert grants of the kind that only procedure types--and here I include myself as well--get excited about. The Court is finally going to deal with an oft-noted problem with the Supplemental Jurisdiction statute (28 U.S.C. § 1367), and, after all these years, it's going to talk about the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. At last! How long we have waited!