What did the Supreme Court say in Employment Division v. Smith?
About this video
Employment Division v. Smith (1990) has been the controlling free exercise standard at the Supreme Court. A drug counsellor in Oregon was fired for using an illegal drug in a church service and denied unemployment compensation; he argued his religious use should override the criminal law. After reviewing its past cases, the Court held that a neutral law that applies equally to everyone does not violate the First Amendment.
You'll be able to
- describe the facts of Employment Division v. Smith.
- state the rule the Court announced in Smith.
- explain what makes a law 'neutral' according to the speaker.
Key words
- Employment Division v. Smith
- The 1990 case holding that neutral, generally applicable laws don't violate free exercise.
- Neutral law
- A law that is not discriminatory and is not aimed at any religion.
- Unemployment compensation
- Payments from the state to people who have lost their jobs.
- Case of first impression
- A case raising a legal question the court has not directly decided before.
Transcript
Video Title: What did the Supreme Court say in Employment Division v. Smith? Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYTIIVoduwA Transcript generated by YouTube Transcript Generator - Extract transcripts from any YouTube video instantly at https://transcriptgenerator.org ======================================== Where is the court today? Well, we'll see. The standard that has been controlling at the court since 1990, which was the year I was clerking for Justice O'Connor, is Employment Division v. Smith.
In which the justices believed and were correct, this was a case of first impression because you had a drug counselor in the State of Oregon who used an illegal drug during a church service, who was saying that his religious use should overcome the criminal law, because he was fired for violating the criminal law and therefore, he couldn't get unemployment compensation.
That is the case in which the Supreme Court reviewed all of its free exercise history, looked at all the cases, and announced, looking at all the cases, we have never said that a religious believer has an automatic preference over the law. Instead, if the law is neutral, so it's not discriminatory, it's not persecuting, it's not intended to go after a religion. If the law is neutral, and the same law applies to everybody who does exactly the same thing, that's not a violation of the First Amendment, and so we had a long series of cases that did that.
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