"substantial burden" in Navajo Nation v. US Forest Service

[hamilton02 at aol.com]

I think Doug is right on the dispositive nature of the land ownership issue.  Public lands like the land at issue in Navajo Nation do not implicate just the "government's interest," but rather the interest of all citizens to benefit from the use of the land. The ability of the government to give special treatment to one religious group is more severely limited because of the nature of the land and the implicit obligations of the government. Obviously the govt is always supposed to serve the people as an abstract principle.  My point here is that there are some situations where the govt's interest in serving all of the people and not just one group is plainer.
With respect to Eugene's suggestion that rfra was intended to cover this situation or not, members of Congress had no defined intentions in the vast majority of cases, because they favored liberty in the abstract not the concrete.  State legislatures have suffered from the same failure to ask specific questions about the huge number of arenas rfras will affect.
The truth is that members were misled into believing that rfra would "simply restore" the status quo when its language dictated application of strict scrutiny in scenarios never before subject to it.
Marci
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Laycock <laycockd at umich.edu>

Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:37:42 
To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics<religionlaw at lists.ucla.edu>
Subject: RE: "substantial burden" in Navajo Nation v. US Forest Service


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