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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 96 > Issue 7 (1998)

 

Abstract

To get right to the point: Mr. Hacker does not disagree that the Establishment Clause would, in the absence of the Fourteenth Amendment, have prohibited Congress from passing a nationwide religion law like RFRA. He believes, however, that the Fourteenth Amendment has in part repealed the First. Of course, he doesn't want to say repealed. The language of repeal is not pleasant to the ears of those who would like to forget about First Amendment antidisestablishmentarianism. The Fourteenth Amendment did not "repeal any aspect of the text of the [Establishment] Clause," Hacker says, but only "change[d] profoundly the meaning of [its] words." If, however, statute A means x and y, and statute B (enacted later) provides "x shall no longer be the law of the land," it makes no difference whether we say that B partially repealed A or merely "changed profoundly the meaning of [its] words." If, moreover, B does not expressly provide that x shall no longer be the law of the land - if, rather, there is merely a debated question of whether B should be so interpreted - then the question, for good or ill, is whether to read B as having partially repealed A. Dodging the word repeal, in other words, does not alter the question. No one had ever supposed that the Fourteenth Amendment rescinded any of the foundational prohibitions laid upon Congress in the First through Eighth Amendments. Until now - for this is just what Mr. Hacker says the Fourteenth Amendment did. Of course, it is possible to read the Fourteenth Amendment this way, but Mr. Hacker's arguments in defense of this position would have been far stronger if he had better appreciated the principles of religious liberty underlying - both in 1789 and in the present day - the Establishment Clause.

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