In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 485 U.S. 439 (1988), the Supreme Court declared constitutional the Forest Service's development plan in an area of the Six Rivers National Forest (known as the High Country) that is central to the religious practice of the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Nations. The Court admitted that “[i]t is undisputed that the Indian respondents’ beliefs are sincere and that the Government's proposed actions will have severe adverse effects on the practice of their religion” (447). Nevertheless, because the disputed area was on public land, the Court thought that the government should be allowed to manage its property in any way it saw fit, regardless of the severe adverse effects on the religious practice of the local Indigenous nations. In this article, I read materials from the trial that led to the Lyng decision, focusing on the Indigenous witnesses and their testimony that has been largely ignored in the Lyng decision. The U.S. legal framework of free exercise does not allow the courts to fully consider the stories told by the Indigenous witnesses in trial. A law-and-literature approach allows me, though, to tell a different story about the High Country, one that centers Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

This article provides the first history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a legal entity. It makes two contributions. First, this history recasts the story of the so-called first disestablishment, revealing that it was longer and more contentious than is often assumed. Disestablishment produced a body of corporate law encoded with strong theological assumptions. Because corporate law was the primary mechanism for regulating churches, this created problems for groups like Roman Catholics and Latter-day Saints who did not share the law's theological commitments. Far from being settled in the early 1830s, the first disestablishment continued to spawn bitter legal battles into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, this article reveals legal personality as one of the key points of conflict between the Latter-day Saints and American society. This is a useful corrective to accounts that emphasize polygamy and theocracy as the points of legal contention. An understanding of the history of the church as a legal entity supplements these stories by revealing how the hard-fought legal battles of the late nineteenth century can be seen as an extension of the process of legal disestablishment that began during the American Revolution.

The Middle Ages are not usually considered an era when the law was friendly to laborers. Numerous regulations in medieval England were very unfriendly to them. However, religious laws—that is, canon law—did act to protect laborers when it came to working on holy days. Examining cases in the ecclesiastical courts, this article traces discussions concerning who was to blame, from theory into practice, when masters compelled their subordinates to work on holy days. Differing ideas on how to assign blame were ultimately reflected in the ecclesiastical courts. Some courts prosecuted only masters, while others prosecuted both masters and subordinates.

This article explores one tumultuous encounter between a religious legal tradition and the modern principle of equality—an encounter that also has the potential to shed light on a much wider cluster of questions. The author tracks the ways that the responsa written by prominent Conservative rabbis on the subject of female rabbinic ordination and gender equality implicitly (but unambiguously) reflect the push toward increased equality that weighed on the movement's trajectory, showing that the debate about the ordination of female rabbis reveals two principal trends in Conservative legal rulings, which differ in their responses to the challenge of egalitarianism and their visions of the law, and notes two outlier responsa that cannot be neatly classified within either trend. The author then examines the deep-seated historical, ideational, and sociological processes concurrent with the rise of what some have called the egalitarian age, which have produced these diverging responses and visions, and it determines an appropriate framework to understand them. The author shows that the fight for increased gender equality is situated within an intricate social context that imbues it with meaning and shapes its outcomes and modes of expression. In concluding, the author suggests applying the insights gained in the course of the analysis to other circumstances in which gender egalitarianism clashes with religious tradition. The framework by which the ordination of women in the Conservative movement is analyzed also proves useful, mutatis mutandis, in understanding and comparing the responses of other faith communities as they deal with challenges caused by the egalitarian age.