Faculty Bibliography

When religious claimants sue to protect their ability to practice their faith, they usually invoke constitutional and statutory guarantees that specifically protect religious exercise. But both historically and today, they often also invoke secular rights-like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or equal protection of the laws. And when they succeed on such claims, they set precedents not just for fellow religious believers, but everyone. As a result, many rights we now take for granted arose from religious minorities fighting for their right to preach, proselytize, and publish their religious views. No study of the Supreme Court's free speech jurisprudence would be complete, for example, without considering the pathbreaking decisions won by Jehovah's Witnesses. But while many scholars have noted the contribution of Witnesses and other religious actors to First Amendment law, little scholarship has examined the broader phenomenon of religious individuals asserting secular rights or traced how their religiously motivated court battles have affected secular individuals in secular contexts. To begin to fill that gap, this article presents a historical account of how religious minorities inspired much of the Bill of Rights' secular freedoms and how Jehovah's Witnesses in particular secured many of those rights in court. The article also illustrates how religious minorities can lay the groundwork for secular social movements by considering how Witness cases in the 1930s and 40s provided crucial legal protections for the Black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Better understanding the role religious minorities have played in shaping our basic secular freedoms has important implications for how religious-claimant cases-both old and new-should be thought of today. In contexts as diverse as a high school coach praying after games to companies like Facebook and YouTube challenging state regulation of their content-feed decisions, litigants and courts must decide both when to resolve religious claimants' cases on secular grounds and, conversely, whether to resolve secular claimants' cases by analogizing to protections afforded to religiously motivated actors.