Religious Accommodation on Both Sides of the Pond: Different Paths to a Common Norm?

In recent years, courts in both the United Kingdom and the United States have confronted high-profile controversies pitting religious freedom claims against equality laws. These cases have highlighted some of the common challenges facing lawmakers and courts in recognizing and limiting conscience rights. Yet many of these challenges long predate the current controversies, and the two jurisdictions have traveled different constitutional, statutory, and doctrinal paths to this point. This project aims to provide a comprehensive comparison of how the law of religious accommodations and exemptions has developed in each country and it revisits a question about religious liberty that St John Robilliard posed 35 years ago: Whether “what the American constitution provides as a matter of law is found in Britain as a matter of convention.”