Equality of Religious Freedom

Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age by Nelson Tebbe makes an important contribution to discussions of legal possibility in a time of seemingly intractable social conflict. Tebbe provides a method of reasoning for cases that find themselves at the center of some of those conflicts, and in so doing he demonstrates that it is possible to protect both religious freedom and social equality in US society. As someone trained in ethics, I am most appreciative of the fact that Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age connects questions of legal reasoning at their most pragmatic to questions of ethical reasoning at their most principled. The method Tebbe presents, “social cohesion,” provides a way to move back and forth between precedents in case law and the ethical principles behind those decisions to allow for coherent resolutions across different cases. The movement between particularities and principles within the framework of social cohesion makes clear how ethics remains central to legal reasoning, even as it is sometimes pushed aside for fear that acknowledging ethical considerations would allow social conflict to engulf legal reasoning.

Aside · Cohesion (chemistry) · Economic freedom · Epistemology · Political science · Religious freedom · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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