"Mormon Student, Justice, ACLU Join Up"

[Douglas Laycock]

  Yes in theory, but in the real world, Eugene's assumed facts will
be very difficult to prove and judges will almost never find them to
be true.  Certainly the judge is not going to believe a primarily
religious motivation for a desire to make more money.  Meditation and
finding the meaning of life might have a slight chance in this case,
because the state's interest in cancelling a four-year scholarship if
the years are not consecutive looks trivial, but judges are going to
be skeptical of such claims. The less conventional the religious
claim, the harder it is to prove.

  In one sense this is discriminatory and unfair. It is also
inevitable. And it is better that success rates gradually fall away
for lack of proof than that we have arbitrary rules that eliminate
whole classes of serious claims.  Better to have some problems at the
margins of an area of law (an almost inevitable circumstance no matter
the rules) than to have incoherence at the core.

  Quoting "Volokh, Eugene" <VOLOKH at law.ucla.edu>:

>     A quick question:  Say the Mormon student wins, on a
Sherbert-like
> rationale.  Another student wants a similar exemption on the
grounds
> that he feels a religious motivation to take two years off to
meditate,
> or to make money to help support his family, or to fulfill what he
sees
> as God's command to step back from formal education and take time
to
> find the meaning of life.  Assume that the student's religious
> motivation for this is found to be sincere.
>
>     I take it that he'd have to be treated the same as the Mormon,
> right?  I'm not saying that this is a particularly horrible result,
but
> I just wanted to explore what the result would end up being.
>
>     Eugene
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Douglas Laycock
Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law
University of Michigan Law School
625 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1215
  734-647-9713

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