The Good and Bad of Hobby Lobby

As oral argument gets underway in the contraceptive mandate cases, the blockbuster RFRA case of the decade, here are a couple of quick thoughts about one or two good and bad things about these cases from the decidedly narrow perspective of the law and religion scholarly community. 

Bad: What has struck me more than anything else about these cases and the argument around them has been the highly aggressive "framing" of the case, its import, and the issues it raises. I am describing general tendencies as I have seen them, and there are always exceptions. But it seems to me that there has been a tremendous effort to frame the case as categorically "easy" one way or the other. Hobby Lobby might win, or at least get some traction, if the argument were that the exemptions already contained in the ACA were sufficient to make the failure to grant an additional accommodation discriminatory according to a decision like Lukumi Babalu Aye. Or it might lose if the question were whether there is a substantial burden here, particularly given the arguable separation between the corporation and its owners, or whether, even if there is a substantial burden, the government nonetheless has a compelling interest in enforcing the mandate.

These issues have certainly been discussed. But much more of the discussion has been about making categorical arguments. That is certainly true on the defendants' side, where there have been arguments that there is no mandate at all, or that corporations are categorically excluded from invoking RFRA (or, sometimes, that they have no Free Exercise rights, although see my last post), among other attempts to say that the plaintiffs don't lose at the balancing stage but lose early, categorically, and absolutely. I think it is perhaps less clear as a strategy on the plaintiffs' side, but even here I think that for many defenders of the plaintiffs' claims there has been an effort to focus on those aspects of the case that advocates believe the plaintiffs should win categorically, and some elision of the more difficult issues, such as where and how to draw the line (if anywhere) between different kinds of entity claimants or how to effect the balancing if there is a viable claim. 

The framing has been still more aggressive, on both sides, at the level of discussion of the stakes of the case. It is a normal strategy of advocates to emphasize slippery slope problems where that will help their case, and to emphasize the law's tendency to impose some common sense and live with slippery slopes where that will help. In this case, both sides have eschewed arguing about how we might draw some lines in this area, and instead have taken an almost apocalyptic view of what the "logic" of the other side's arguments will lead to, as if inexorable, unstoppable logic and nothing more drives the development of cases and lines of precedent. So, on the one side, a victory for Hobby Lobby will lead to the destruction of civil rights laws in general and to the obliteration of the rule of law. And on the other, the logic of those who defend the mandate will lead to the complete undoing of religious freedom. 

These framing efforts have been aided and abetted, by serious people on both sides, by fighting so much of the battle in the public sphere and not just in briefs and scholarly articles. On sites like Slate or columns like Linda Greenhouse's, or on corresponding conservative sites, there has been a constant pounding drumbeat on this case, and it's in the nature of those kinds of public debate that the rhetoric is heated and often outstrips the nuances, and ignores the possible saving constructions or reasonable limits that often figure in the actual decision of a case. In this the public commentators and the more serious academic types have, it seems to me, worked hand in glove. I consider that an unfortunate development.

One friend (with whom I respectfully disagree about the case itself, for what it's worth) has suggested to me that this is a product of the seeming success of the heavy ref-working in the NFIB case. That case offered to the legal and legal academic communities a template for the way that contentious legal issues will be played out in the press and elsewhere from now on. That's a fair lesson to take from that experience but, in my view, a deeply unfortunate one, especially for those legal academics who get involved in playing the public framing game. There are high stakes in this case even after the rhetoric is stripped away. But I see the job of legal academics and experts on a particular issue as being to explore and explain the nuances of cases, to show what the stakes are and what problems will be raised by deciding a case on particular principles, but also to explain why it is unlikely that any given case will turn on nothing more than principle and logic and how courts might, however clumsily or incoherently, soften the blows of particular legal principles. Certainly it's not their job to raise the stakes, or indulge the commentariat in its heated rhetoric, for purposes of encouraging a particular result.

Again, this is obviously a particular and personal perspective on the public discussion of the Hobby Lobby case. But I have been very disappointed by and worried about the nature of that discussion, and many academics' role in it.

Good: Until recently, my general view of the law and religion community in the United States, which is a fairly small group, has been that there is too much consensus. We mostly all get along very well (although some of this depends on how you define that scholarly community). We certainly don't all agree! On the whole, though, I thought we tended to agree on so much that at times we didn't fully appreciate or explore some fundamental issues and differences in this field. We took very different views on how to interpret the Religion Clauses, but most of us took religion itself seriously and thought religious liberty a good in itself.

I think that consensus, if I was right to see one there, has substantially dissolved in the past two years, quickly and startingly. It is illustrated in some ways by the letter referenced in this link, signed by several friends whose work I respect, which argues that whatever law and religion scholars and others might have thought about RFRA twenty years ago, we should question state RFRAs altogether today, partly because of their substance and partly because they will be "seen . . . as a shield against enforcement of civil rights laws (current and future)." (emphasis added) It is striking to me, although not necessarily unreasonable, that a group of scholars could now oppose state RFRAs that they might once have supported as much because of their purported "expressive meaning" as because of their substance. More generally, there has been a stark division in the law and religion ranks of late, one driven substantially by the standard conflicts between liberty and equality, and one that has played out in a dramatic and heated fashion with very little apparent middle ground.

As a middle-ground type myself, I am saddened by this development. But it may be that this loss of consensus will be good for law and religion scholars, insofar as it forces us to state our premises more clearly and defend them against more vigorous attack. I do worry that this will tend to make the issues seem more polarized than they actually are, and lead scholars in the field to ignore the messy real-world compromises, and the inevitable if questionable splitting of the difference on matters of principle, that actually take place on the ground in church-state relations and in contests between liberty and equality more generally. But it may lead to more clarity in the field, even if some of that clarity is ultimately directed at defining more precisely the areas in which there are unbridgeable differences between us. Whether any of that will benefit anyone outside the community of law and religion scholars is, of course, a separate question.