The Supreme Court handed down a brief and highly unusual order Wednesday evening that set the stage for more legal wrangling over the line between religious freedom and anti-discrimination laws.
The order itself is very narrow, giving lawyers for an orthodox Jewish university specific instructions on which motions they must file to ask New York’s appeals courts to reconsider a decision against the university.
A state trial court ordered the university to recognize an LGBTQ student group, something the school refused to do on religious grounds. The school sought relief on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a process for obtaining expedited relief from the justices without invoking the Court’s ordinary processes. And the university actually had a strong case that the state court was at least partly in the wrong, under longstanding Supreme Court precedents.
Read Full Article »