"Mormon Student, Justice, ACLU Join Up"

[Volokh, Eugene]

	Hmm -- why is this so?  First, I've seen very few cases in which
a judge finds a religious claimant to be insincere.  My sense is that
judges tend to try to avoid doing this, partly because reading people's
minds on such issues seems even more unreliable, bias-prone, and
subjective than reading people's minds on other issues.

	Second, why is it so odd to imagine a religious motivation --
does it really have to be "primary," by the way? -- for an 18-year-old's
desire to spend a couple of years helping support his disabled parents
(perhaps a way of "honor[ing his] father and mother"), or his new wife
and child?  I would think that many a religious person would indeed feel
such a religious duty or at least religious motivation, no?

	Eugene


Doug Laycock writes:

	 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