Minority Rights, Governing Regimes, or Secular Elites: Who Benefits from the Protection of Religious and Anti-Religious Speech by the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights?

Author(s)/Creator(s)

• Thomas Keck, Syracuse University
• Nathan T. Carrington
• Claire Sigsworth

Document Type

Article

Date

12-13-2022

Acknowledgements

Originally published in Journal of Law & Courts, vol. 11, no. 2, 2023, pp. 221–255. 

Disciplines

Political Science

Description/Abstract

This paper draws on new data regarding judicial decisions involving religious and anti-religious expression to map the political beneficiaries of judicial empowerment. In particular, the paper assesses the extent to which free expression decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have favored claimants who are religious majorities, religious minorities, or secular elites. We find the U.S. doctrine relatively more libertarian and the ECtHR doctrine relatively more secularist, but that both bodies of case law extend regular and substantial rights protection to religious minorities.

Recommended Citation

Keck, Thomas; Carrington, Nathan T.; and Sigsworth, Claire, "Minority Rights, Governing Regimes, or Secular Elites: Who Benefits from the Protection of Religious and Anti-Religious Speech by the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights?" (2022). Political Science - All Scholarship. 16.
https://surface.syr.edu/psc/16

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.