Coronavirus, the Compelling State Interest in Health, and Religious Autonomy

W. Cole Durham, Jr. is Founding Director of the Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies

Experience with COVID-19 has refocused attention on the relationship between the state’s interest in protecting public health and the protection of freedom of religion even during a clear health emergency.  Does the state have unfettered discretion to shut down religious services? Can the state regulate clergy conduct in ways that preclude the administration of last rites? Can the state specify whether and how religious rituals are performed? Can the state dictate funeral practices? Is the state free to determine how “essential” religious practices are?

These are simply a few of countless issues that have arisen over the past six months. The challenge presented by such examples is complicated by the fact that different religious communities have very different religious practices, generating distinctive religious needs, and posing distinctive health risks.  Also, for a variety of internal religious reasons, different religious communities may have differing abilities to adapt their religious practices to publically imposed mandates.

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Quarantines, Religious Groups, and Some Questions About Equality

Christopher C. Lund is Professor of law at Wayne State University Law School

When the government imposes quarantine orders for public safety, shutting some places down and leaving other places open, how should it treat religious organizations and religious services?  A natural answer is that religious organizations should be treated equally. And that makes sense. Equality is a solid moral principle, with wide-ranging appeal and deep roots in history and in law.

But equality is not self-executing. And the deeper one goes into these quarantine orders, the more that becomes apparent.  We are trying to treat religion equally, but we don’t quite know how. I’m planning a longer piece that will go into more details. But for this blog post, let me simply try to demonstrate two things to you.  First, quarantine schemes require judgments about the value of religious exercise—which is uncomfortable in a system like ours, which tries to keep the government out of such questions.  And second, by insisting that all gatherings of all religious organizations be treated the same way, quarantine schemes become blind to genuine religious differences. We are deciding how much to restrict religious organizations in general by imagining what happens in a religious service, but our imagined religious service ends up looking a lot like a Sunday morning Christian worship service.

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Law, Religion, and Coronavirus between the United States and the European Union

Alejandro González-Varas is Professor of Public Law in the School of Law of the University of Zaragoza, Spain

Preliminary: Main UE Measures in Relation to COVID-19

Coronavirus has arrived to Europe so suddenly than in the other places in the world. The European Union had to take quick measures in order to avoid the spread of the virus across the continent. The European Union has tried to support national health systems and counter the socio-economic impact of the pandemic at both national and EU level. It has fostered different measures in many fields, such as Economics, public health, or borders. It supplies updated information in the web about Overview of the Commission’s response.

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