On The Future Of Offices And Cities

Me, about 20 years ago, in my (most definitely not paperless) office (Photo by David Lat).

This coming weekend, my husband and son and I will return to Manhattan.

For the past four and a half months, since my discharge from the hospital on April 1, we’ve been away from New York, dividing our time between my parents in New Jersey and my parents-in-law in Massachusetts. But we feel that it’s finally time to come home.

Of course, we could certainly stay away for longer if we wanted to. My husband and I could continue working remotely, since our employers have not yet reopened their offices. Our son is not yet old enough to be required to go to school (and for kids who are, school reopening plans remain unclear).

And many of our fellow New Yorkers have decided that they will stay away for longer — much, much longer, like forever. These New Yorkers have decided that they are tired of being New Yorkers. If they’re not required to be in the city for work, and if many of the cultural and culinary attractions of New York are either still closed or only partially reopened, why put up with the difficulties, inconveniences, and high cost of city living?

I have previously written about how the coronavirus pandemic has made Biglaw more open to working remotely. Forced to go virtual, law firms have discovered that it’s not so bad — and even has its advantages. Lawyers who no longer have to commute have more time to bill; in my work as a recruiter, I’ve spoken to a number of partners and associates who have hit records in terms of monthly billing during the pandemic. And work is more tolerable when, say, you can take a break in the afternoon to play with your kid or jog on the beach.

So let’s play this out a little. Even after the COVID-19 crisis is behind us, law firms will be more tolerant of working remotely, and individual lawyers will increasingly expect — and even demand — the ability to work remotely (at least for part of the time, or for specified reasons). From the Commercial Observer:

In 2017, brokerage Cushman & Wakefield asked 500 law firms a question: Do you anticipate your attorneys will work more remotely in the next five years? Of the respondents, 62 percent said yes. The brokerage asked the same question in January 2020. This time, the figure jumped, with 78 percent responding yes.

And that was before a pandemic.

When the brokerage asked the question amid the coronavirus outbreak this spring, some 120 firms, large to small, responded — and 96 percent said yes, they anticipated their attorneys will work more remotely in the next five years.

Even before COVID-19, law firms were already moving in the direction of smaller offices. Post-pandemic, the trend will accelerate, as law firms try to reduce their real estate costs — one of the biggest expenses of a law firm — by taking advantage of the fact that more of their employees will be working remotely, for more of the time.

I suspect that some law firms will move to either “hoteling” or “hot desking,” two models in which employees don’t have their own set offices or desks. (In hoteling, you make a “reservation” for a space, like you would for a hotel room; in hot desking, it’s more “first come, first served,” where you grab an open space.) For example, check out what Freshfields has in store for employees in its new London office, as reported by Law.com:

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer lawyers face a new challenge when the firm completes its move into its new London office later this year. The firm is planning to operate an ‘office release system’ which means someone else can use your office if you are working remotely.

“If you’re not there, you give your office up,” said London managing partner Claire Wills of the office-wide rule.

The system, which will mean junior lawyers or colleagues from overseas can use a partner’s office if it is empty, will be a cultural change for the top U.K.-based firm…. However, [Wills] said that the pandemic has accelerated such cultural changes, with technology and paper-free working fast becoming the norm.

Note the reference to “paper-free working,” a key component of the equation. Lawyers previously justified having private offices, which they could lock when they left for the day, because of all the (often sensitive or confidential) documents in their offices. But now that those documents are largely digital, whether housed in servers or in the cloud, the case for proprietary desks and offices is much weaker.

And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Going paperless has forced me, a paper pack rat — see the photo of me in my office as a law clerk at the top of this post — to clean up my act. Today I can find documents much more easily, whether they’re on my MacBook or in Google Drive, than I could when they were in disorganized stacks on my desk. I suspect I’m not alone.

So far, so good. The ability for more people to work remotely, whether permanently or on as-needed basis — e.g., because you’re sick, your child is sick, or you have to wait for the cable guy (or gal) — seems like a good thing. The ability of law firms to spend less on office overhead also seems like a good thing. They can (and will) spend some of the savings on technology, of course — more telecommuting requires better tech — but some of the savings will surely find a way back to the pockets of partners, associates, and staff.

But here’s what worries me: the future of our cities. Consider this portrait of midtown Manhattan — the greatest agglomeration of major law firms in the United States, if not the world — from the New York Times:

Midtown Manhattan, the muscular power center of New York City for a century, faces an economic catastrophe, a cascade of loss upon loss that threatens to alter the very identity of the city’s corporate base. The coronavirus’s toll of lost professions, lost professionals and untold billions of lost income and tax revenue may take years to understand and resolve.

Now, midtown has never been the most charming neighborhood — the West Village it is not — so maybe some might say, “Good riddance.” But that ignores the economic toll that collapsing commercial centers and dying downtowns inflict upon the cities in which they’re situated.

If you’re in the mood to read something depressing and disturbing, check out this post by James Altucher, a longtime New Yorker. Here’s his response to the “New York comes back, it has always come back” argument:

[T]his time is different. You’re never supposed to say that but this time it’s true. If you believe this time is no different, that NYC is resilient, I hope you’re right….

[T]his time is different. One reason: Bandwidth.

In 2008, average bandwidth speeds were 3 megabits per second. That’s not enough for a Zoom meeting with reliable video quality. Now, it’s over 20 megabits per second. That’s more than enough for high-quality video.

There’s a before and after. BEFORE: No remote work. AFTER: Everyone can work remotely.

And, for better or worse, many people will. As more residents leave, no longer required to live in New York, it will become a less attractive place to live and work. New York and cities like it will lose their cultural cachet — they will no longer be where the “cool kids” live — and some people will leave for that reason. The remaining residents will face higher taxes, and some of them will leave too.

This coming weekend, my husband and son and I will return to Manhattan. Our (almost) 3-year-old son can’t wait; for weeks he has been saying, “Tomorrow we’re going back to New York City.”

We still believe in New York. We hope our belief is justified.

Earlier: What Good Might Come Out Of The Coronavirus Crisis?


DBL square headshotDavid Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer, speaker, and legal recruiter at Lateral Link, where he is a managing director in the New York office. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. David previously worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@laterallink.com.

Georgia Cops Threaten To Lock Kids Up For Sex Crimes At Zoom School

The first week of Zoom school last spring, one of my own children changed his image to a black square with white lettering that said “Click here to end call.” Which is exactly what the teacher did, several times. Everyone laughed, even the poor teacher … eventually.

Because teenagers are assholes. And if being obnoxious were against the law, we’d have to throw all of them in jail.

But according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, that’s exactly what the cops in Henry County, Georgia are threatening to do after reports of kids posting porn onscreen during remote classes.

“Students: If you stream pornography in an online class, myself and the Henry County GA Sheriff’s Office will find you and charge you with life-altering charges,” the original post read. “We’re 24 hours in, and I’m over it.”

It appears to have been edited now to include reference to specific Georgia statutes, before being removed altogether once the story hit the papers.

Luckily, the internet is forever.

How standard 9th grade dipshittery is transformed into “manufacture and distribution of child pornography charges, child molestation charges, and hav[ing] to register as a sex offender” is not entirely clear.

Georgia’s obscenity distribution laws are generally applied to commercial sale, rather than a 14-year-old holding his phone up to the webcam to flash a photo during math class. Law enforcement declined to elaborate on the “incident” currently under investigation by a Henry County Sheriff’s Office school resource officer. But if it involved the bog standard, consenting adult porn that’s never more than a click away, it’s not clear how the child pornography statutes might apply.

O.C.G.A. 16-6-4 criminalizes showing porn to kids under 16 “with the intent to arouse or satisfy the sexual desires of either the child or the person.” So being a little twerp trying to get a rise out of your classmates is probably not going to satisfy the mens rea requirement. And, by the by, the sex offender registry statute specifically states “conduct which is adjudicated in juvenile court shall not be considered a dangerous sexual offense.” So kids 16 and under specifically excluded.

But other than that, bang up legal work there, fellas! Zoom school sucks, but somehow the Henry County Police Department managed to make it even worse.

Cops say students are streaming porn during virtual class [AJC]


Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

This Federal Judge Really, Really Doesn’t Like Too Many Footnotes

As a profession, judges really aren’t known for letting the little things slide. Sure, every judge is different, blah, blah, blah, but they’re given wide latitude to make and enforce their own rules, and you’d best believe they’re going to take that seriously. Yes, even over something as seemingly minor as a footnote — if it’s important enough to have a local rule over, it’s surely important enough to enforce the rule.

That lesson is one the Department of Justice is learning the hard way. As reported by Law.com, Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has sent the DOJ back to the drawing board “for violating the court’s local rule on excessive footnotes, particularly given the length of the footnotes here.” The case was brought against the DOJ by the Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, the National Security Archives, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations over allegations the State Department failed to properly document policies in violation of the Federal Records Act.

The local rule isn’t specific on the exact number of footnotes or lines of text, saying, “All pleadings shall appear in 12-pt font and shall be double-spaced. Footnotes, which shall not be excessive, shall also appear in 12-pt font.” But after rejecting the DOJ’s initial filing over the amount of footnotes, they were given very specific instructions. They had to cut down the footnotes to “no more than five footnotes with no more than 25 aggregate lines of text.” Compare that with the original brief, which had 12 footnotes with 80 lines of text.

This isn’t the first (or even second) time Judge Boasberg has made a big deal over the length of footnotes. So, if you have a case in front of him, consider this your notice and footnote accordingly.


headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Law School To Permanently Close One Of Its Campuses

We’re doing this from a position of strength. We could continue to lose money on this campus, but we’re doing this to shore everything up. It’s not like a fire sale. We believe for the future of legal education, one campus in Michigan is enough. We’re not in danger of closing. It’s just that we really need to plan for the future.

— Dean James McGrath of the Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School, commenting on the decision to close the school’s Grand Rapids campus at the end of the academic year, due to a significant drop in enrollment with applications “way down” due to COVID-19. This is the second Cooley Law campus to close in as many years. The school closed its Auburn Hills campus last year because it was “undersubscribed.” With COVID—even though applications to law school are up slightly—the applications to us in the range of students we’re trying to attract is way down.” Per McGrath, “We ended up not laying off any people in Auburn Hills. I don’t think we’ll get that lucky in Grand Rapids.” This will leave Cooley Law with only its Lansing, Michigan, and Tampa Bay, Florida, campuses.


Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Ain’t No Party Like A COVID Party

As law schools return, one student gets a stern warning about a COVID kegger, law firms get a new ranking, and an unqualified judge issues the sort of baseless decision that landed him on the bench in the first place. A rundown of the week that was in legal news.

Judge Accused Of Using Sexually Graphic Language With Attorney

Judge Bruce Morrow of Wayne County, Michigan, is facing an ethics complaint, released last week by the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission, which accuses the judge of violating judicial canons requiring judges be dignified and courteous and treat others with respect. The complaint details interactions with an assistant district attorney who asked the judge for feedback regarding her direct examination, in which he used sexually graphic language.

According to reports, during a June 2019 trial, the assistant prosecutor asked for feedback on her questioning of a medical examiner. Morrow allegedly said he’d come down from the bench to have the conversation “because what he was going to say to her would make her ‘blush.’” The complaint says the judge “positioned himself very close” to the prosecutor. He then analogized questioning witnesses to sex, according to the complaint:

“The climax of sex is akin to getting the medical examiner to state the cause and manner of death after getting the details of his examination of the body. … You start with all the information from the report, all the testimony crescendos to the cause and manner of death, which is the sex of the testimony. … You want to tease the jury with the details of the examination. … You want to lead them to the climax of the manner and cause of death.”

But that’s not the only inappropriate behavior detailed in the ethics complaint. Morrow also allegedly discussed with the assistant prosecutor, another assistant prosecutor, and defense counsel DNA evidence in the case which revealed the defendant’s DNA in a vaginal swab of the deceased victim, saying, “All you did was show they f- – -ed!”

When discussing the defendant’s testimony that the way he had sex with the victim was altered because she was pregnant and the defendant said he didn’t want to hurt the baby, Morrow allegedly said words to the effect of, “This guy must feel real good about himself to think his d- – – is that big.”

Morrow is also accused of criticism of the other assistant prosector’s voir dire with vulgar language to the effect of:

“If I want to have sex with a woman on the first date, how would I figure that out? I wouldn’t ask her if she wants family or children or what she does. I would ask her, ‘Have you had sex on a first date before?’ Would you sleep with me on a first date?”

According to the complaint, Morrow also “was overtly eyeing both of [the assistant prosectors’] bodies,” and asking them their height and weight. When one of them responded he allegedly said, “Well, I haven’t assessed your muscle mass yet.”

New Petition Uses NCBE’s Own Logic To Support Diploma Privilege Bid

The push for diploma privilege across the country has taken many avenues, from court filings to legislative appeals to direct protest. Another state is going to hear the former with a new petition filed by Temple Law Emeritus Professor Louis M. Natali Jr. and attorneys from Buchanan Ingersoll, headed by shareholder Michael Engle, on behalf of Law Students for Equitable Responses to COVID-19 (LSERC).

The petition lodges a constitutional challenge to the online bar exam format, requesting emergency diploma privilege plus as opposed to throwing applicants into the choppy waters of online testing.

The petition, provided on the next page, contends that the October online exam amounts to an as applied violation of the Pennsylvania state constitution, which provides that the freedom to pursue one’s profession not be denied absent due process. Existing licensing regulations must thus pass a heightened rational basis test demonstrating a “real and substantial relation” to the public interest that can overcome a finding that a requirement is “unreasonable, unduly oppressive, or patently beyond the necessities of the case,” as applied.

The twist is that the petition uses the NCBE’s reasoning to argue for diploma privilege. Taking as a given that forcing applicants into an in-person exam is a bridge too far — something the bar examiners already conceded when they opted for an online exam — the petition then cites the NCBE’s insistence that online exams cannot possibly protect the public the way their in-person exam does.

The NCBE has made clear that a reduced-question, remote bar exam cannot reliably measure minimum competency due to the lack of psychometric research: “Without further research, scores from an abbreviated version of the MBE administered by remote testing cannot be considered comparable to the standard, paper-based, full-length MBE administration, such comparability being an essential requirement for equating and scaling.”

If the hardships are already too extreme for an in-person exam then the online exam must fall because it cannot meet the required threshold of substantial relation to the goal of protecting the public. It’s a clever angle of attack that has the benefit of making a lot of sense. A survey cited in the filing notes some underheralded harms of the delays:

In terms of financial costs, October Candidates have suffered discrete financial harms due to the postponements of the July Exam (81.5%) and the September Exam (at least 74%). Exhibit D-1. The harm is so burdensome that only 39.1% of 299 respondents reported that they are financially able to study through the October Exam. Id. In fact, over 30% of 234 respondents anticipated needing to apply for a bar loan because of the second postponement of the July Exam. Id.

On top of this are the costs associated with technology and testing space acquisition. There’s just no good argument for dragging this out!

Especially when the NCBE laid the groundwork themselves for this powerful defense of diploma privilege. This probably isn’t where they expected to find themselves cited, but COVID makes strange bedfellows.


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Law Students Forced To Urinate While Being Watched By Proctors During Remote Ethics Exam

Thanks to the pandemic, law school graduates in America have been beset by a host of technical difficulties that wound up cancelling bar exams. Across the pond, law students who sat for the ethics portion of the UK’s Bar Professional Training Course fared no better at all.

The exam, similar to the MPRE, was administered by Pearson VUE for the Bar Standards Board, complete with remote proctors. To “protect the integrity of the test” and be sure that no cheating was taking place, students who took the online test were not permitted to leave the room or break eye contact with their screens. Students who chose to take the exam in person were permitted bathroom breaks. This created a major problem for remote test-takers who had to use the bathroom during the almost three-hour exam.

Law students reportedly begged and pleaded with proctors for bathroom breaks, only to be refused. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so some law students opted to urinate in bottles and buckets — without looking away from their computer screens while doing so. RollOnFriday has the account of Tian Juin See, just one of the law students who was forced to perform this incredibly awkward deed:

“I tried to hold it, but a little while later I asked again and he said no,” said Tian.

“It became rather unbearable and it was having an effect on my concentration,” he said. Despite “literally begging” the proctor, Tian was told that “policy doesn’t allow the use of toilets during exams. I told him that if I’m not allowed, I’m going to have to pee in the bottle, but he still wouldn’t let me use the toilet.”

“Finally, I couldn’t hold it anymore,” said Tian. “So I dumped out the water in my bottle all over my carpet,” though he couldn’t see where he was pouring it as the proctor said he was not allowed to turn away from the camera, “and attempted to take a piss into my bottle, blindly, while trying not to move around too much or look away from my screen.”

“When I was done I raised the now yellow bottle to the webcam as if to say: ‘Are you happy now?’”

Here’s the evidence See posted to Twitter after the exam:

Sophie Lamb, another aspiring barrister, said she had to urinate in a bucket during the test. In an interview with The Sun, she said: “I had to put the bucket under the chair and I was wearing a long dress and had to squat down, but make sure my face was still on camera,” adding, “To be honest it was a bit ridiculous. The fact that this is an organisation that is meant to be promoting our ethical standards, but also our welfare.” She ultimately wasn’t able to complete her exam — the program crashed.

UK law students had to risk their health and safety by taking the ethics exam in person or risk their privacy by taking the ethics exam remotely. The Bar Standards Board really did a piss poor job of handling this “un-pee-believable” situation.

UN-PEE-BELIEVABLE Law students forced to urinate in bottles and maintain eye contact with screens for nearly three hours in remote exams [The Sun]
Aspiring barristers forced to urinate in bottles [RollOnFriday]


Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Nonbelievers Must Stand Up For Their Free-Conscience Rights

Last week, federal Judge Justin Walker issued a decision blocking the City of Louisville from enforcing its nondiscrimination law against a wedding photographer who refuses to service same-sex couples. According to Walker the issue is rather simple: The photographer’s work “is art. Art is speech” and “[t]he government can’t compel speech when it violates the speaker’s religious or political principles.” If applied evenly, such a standard probably sounds fair to a lot of Americans. I mean, I would personally never discriminate against same-sex couples in such a way and view any reason to do so (including religious reasons), as vile and despicable. But if everyone was indeed protected against government compulsion of speech that violated their religious or political principles, that would at least be fair and reflective of a society committed to pluralism. Except that is not the system we currently have. The current system not only grants extraordinary favor to religion in a way not yet extended to nonbelievers, but judicial actors often treat nonbeliever claims with general disfavor and open contempt.

First, let’s examine the claim that government grants extraordinary preference for religion that has yet to be extended to nonbelievers by looking at the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). Recently, Justice Neil Gorsuch called RFRA a “super statute” that can displace “the normal operation of other federal laws” for religious belief. Perhaps the most well-known and controversial Supreme Court decision regarding RFRA is Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Store, Inc. In Hobby Lobby, the Court held that RFRA prohibited the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from enforcing the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive care mandate on “three closely held for-profit corporations that have sincere Christian beliefs.”

It is important to recognize that the plaintiff’s claimed harm in Hobby Lobby was attenuated by the decision-making of multiple third parties including licensed physicians and employees (more on this point below). Nevertheless, the Court held that under RFRA’s standard, such attenuation did not matter and neither did the reasonableness of the religious belief. All that matters, the Court said, is whether a burden is being place on religious belief and whether that belief reflects “an honest conviction.” Here is the crux of the Court’s reasoning in Hobby Lobby:

“The Hahns and Greens believe that providing the coverage demanded by the HHS regulations is connected to the destruction of an embryo in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral for them to provide the coverage. This belief implicates a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is wrong for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another. Arrogating the authority to provide a binding national answer to this religious and philosophical question, HHS and the principal dissent in effect tell the plaintiffs that their beliefs are flawed.”

It is also important to recognize that over the years RFRA has been applied to all religions fairly equally, not just Christians. Here is the rub though: It is not clear whether RFRA applies to nonbelievers. Indeed, to my knowledge, every time a nonbeliever has tried to make an RFRA claim, the courts have rejected it. Often using a very different standard for nonbeliever plaintiffs than the one applied to believers in Hobby Lobby.

For example, it would seem obvious that by forcing nonbelievers to use currency that displays the phrase “In God We Trust” that government is arrogating the authority to provide a binding national answer to a deeply religious and philosophical question, right? Is it not plain that the government is in effect telling nonbelievers (who do not believe in, much less trust a god) that their beliefs are flawed? But guess what happened when a nonbeliever tried to assert an RFRA claim? It was rejected. I cannot help but think that if Congress ever tries to put the phrase “We Trust In No God,” on our currency, or “In Contraception Care We Trust,” or better yet, “In Gay Marriage We Trust” suddenly we will see some “evolving” analysis on whether such mottos amount to government impermissibly telling plaintiffs their beliefs are flawed.

In any case, if nonbelievers cannot invoke RFRA in the same way the religious plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby did, nonbeliever free-conscience claims will be left to a far less favorable standard under current Establishment Clause doctrine. To demonstrate how the RFRA standard is far more generous to plaintiffs than current Establishment Clause doctrine, let’s compare the standard used to decide a recent Establishment Clause case with the standard used in Hobby Lobby. 

In both cases, the government regulatory structure at issue utilized the same basic functions, albeit for very different services. In Hobby Lobby the service government was mandating corporations provide financial coverage for was comprehensive health care plans. In the Establishment Clause case, the compelled support was for private education. Perhaps the most important similarity between the two cases, however, is that government was not choosing for the plaintiffs as to what form the compelled service must take. In each case, the decision as to form and substance was left to the complete discretion of private third parties.

Yet, despite these remarkable similarities in the government regulatory scheme in each case, the Court came to the diametrically opposed conclusions in regards to whether the schemes violated free conscience. As noted above, although the existence of third-party attenuation does not effect RFRA claims, it is dispositive to any Establishment Clause claim. Accordingly, if RFRA is not applied to nonbelievers, government would in effect be granting free-conscience objections made by religious citizens a preferred and demonstrably easier standard to satisfy. Which is why in order for religious liberty to be considered equal, nonbelievers must be granted the same free-conscience protections afforded to believers under the RFRA standard.

Of course, with a hostile judiciary, nonbelievers should expect significant resistance to courts offering equal treatment under RFRA. I use the term hostile to describe the judiciary for several reasons. First, despite the fact that as our population has increased in nonbelief, become more urbanized, and yes, more open sexually, our country has only gotten safer and safer. The current attorney general will go to our nation’s law schools and tell students that nonbelievers, collectively, are directly responsible for all social ills. I use the term hostile because federal courts are now telling nonbelievers they can be prohibited from addressing their own state legislatures with opening messages of unity and peace. Or that nonbelievers cannot perform private wedding ceremonies, even for nonbelieving couples.

If nonbelievers overcome this judicial hostility, the consequences of the RFRA standard being extended to the sincere convictions of nonbelievers would be pronounced. Nonbelief is literally defined by the sincere conviction not to support, subscribe, or to adhere to any religion. I submit there is no lack of Americans who hold the sincere conviction that being compelled by government (even through the decision-making of third parties) to support religious institutions that label their marriages as abominations, or whose members refuse to serve them in commerce, is immoral. The only question is when will our courts begin to recognize such sincere convictions with the same respect they afford religious convictions.


Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.