Religious and parental rights are ascendant in public schools following the Supreme Court’s decision Mahmoud v. Taylor and its interim docket order Mirabelli v. Bonta. Mahmoud focused on free exercise opt-out claims as they relate to the curricular content taught in public schools, and Mirabelli expanded that rule to reach the gender transition non-disclosure policies adopted by some of those schools. This Note considers...
First Amendment
The Columbia Law Review’s Karl Llewellyn Lecture series celebrates pioneers in the law who have innovated and challenged legal theory. The third annual Lecture was delivered by Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP Senior Counsel and distinguished First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams on February 12, 2026. A transcript of Mr. Abrams’s Lecture is published in this Issue.
The full text of this Lecture...
In recent years, the Supreme Court has developed a robust antidiscrimination principle rooted in the Free Exercise Clause that commands that generally available public benefits may not be denied to religious organizations because of their religious identity. In St. Isidore v. Drummond ex rel. Oklahoma, school-choice advocates sought to extend this principle to Oklahoma’s public charter school program, arguing that excluding a Catholic...
The Columbia Law Review’s Karl Llewellyn Lecture series celebrates pioneers in the law who have innovated and challenged legal theory. The second annual Lecture was delivered by Howard University School of Law Professor Justin Hansford on November 15, 2024, as the opening address at the Review’s Symposium on the Law of Protest. A transcript of Professor Hansford’s Lecture is published in this Issue. ...
Protests are woven into the history and social fabric of the United States. Whether the topic involves racial inequity, abortion, police brutality, oil and gas pipelines, war, or allegedly stolen elections, Americans will voice their opposition—occasionally, in frightening or destructive ways. Politicians, in turn, have a history of using their lawmaking power to discourage protest by creating crimes like unlawful assembly, riot, civil disorder,...
The functional absence of the Assembly Clause in First Amendment law and constitutional discourse fundamentally distorts our analysis of the proper scope of constitutional protection for political assemblies. This Symposium Piece develops a much-needed independent Assembly Clause doctrine. An independent Assembly Clause doctrine would not only be consistent with the text and original understanding of the Founders but also allow for a jurisprudence...
The full text of this Foreword can be found by clicking the PDF link to the left.
In recent years, a growing number of litigants and scholars have argued that—despite the usual rule in federal court that only final orders are appealable—interlocutory orders denying church-autonomy defenses under the First Amendment can be appealed immediately. Proponents ground their claims in the belief that church autonomy provides religious institutions with an immunity from suit, rather than with a mere defense to liability. As a result,...
The Supreme Court has recently adopted a new rule of religious equality: Laws unconstitutionally discriminate against religion when they deny religious exemptions but provide secular exemptions that undermine the law’s interests to the same degree as would a religious exemption. All the Justices and a cadre of scholars have agreed in principle with this approach to religious equality. This Essay argues that this new rule of religious equality...
Book bans and censorship battles have garnered considerable attention in recent years, but one of the most critical battlegrounds is kept out of the public eye. Prison officials can ban any book that threatens the security or operations of their facility. This means that the knowledge access rights of incarcerated people are subject to the judgments of the people detaining them. This Note focuses on books about Black people in America and books...