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In Rubinstein v. The Minister of Defense (1998) and several subsequent cases, the Israeli Supreme Court invalidated executive branch administrative acts and Knesset laws granting exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva students. In its reasoning, the Supreme Court mainly referred to separation-of-power and equality issues. While he initially supported some of these decisions, Gideon Sapir (Bar-Ilan University) eventually changed his opinion for several reasons explained in this video.
In Leyla Şahin v. Turkey (2004), the European Court of Human Rights sided with the Turkish government in prohibiting a medical student to wear the hijab on public university property. Michel Rosenfeld (Benjamine N. Cardozo School of Law) explains why he changed his opinion regarding the Court’s Leyla Şahin judgment and why he believes that, had it been decided in 2026, the case would have required a different approach.
A Quite Architecture of Religious Freedom at Work
By Fábio Ferreira Nascimento
A few years ago, if someone had suggested that multinational corporations would become important laboratories for religious freedom, many scholars of law and religion would have been skeptical. After all, corporations are not churches. They are not courts. They are not the democratic or civil society institutions we usually associate with protecting freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). And yet that is precisely where some of the most interesting FoRB-related developments are taking place today. In the article “Mediating Religious Intolerance in Corporate Workplaces,” published in the International Journal for Religious Freedom, Nascimento argues that one of the most overlooked institutions promoting religious freedom today is not a public body or a religious organization but an internal corporate network: the faith-oriented Employee Resource Group (ERG).
In the video, Thomas Berg, the author of Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age and professor of law at University of St. Thomas School of Law, explains his evolution of opinion on same-sex marriage. While initially he supported same-sex marriage as a matter of policy important for both conservatives and liberals, he eventually began viewing it as a constitutional right—the recognition of which is important not only for same-sex couples but also for symmetrical religious freedom protection.
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