id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cjrl-2315	DeLise, James M.	Religious Exemptions to Neutral Laws of General Applicability and the Theory of Disparate Impact Discrimination	2016	24	.pdf	application/pdf	16226	610	38	Just as Washington v. Davis33 relegated remedies for race-based disparate impact in employment to the statutory level, the Court’s ruling in Employment Division v. Smith,34 served the same function in the context of religious free exercise, as the Court determined that there was no constitutional right to religious exemptions—thus ensuring that Congress and state legislatures would determine the ultimate fate of religious exemptions to generally applicable, neutral laws. McConnell points to this indirect evidence, along with writings of James Madison, to argue that the exemptions approach to free exercise is more consistent with the Framer’s original intent than the no-exemptions approach.55 At the same time, however, he acknowledges that this evidence is merely suggestive and not probative.56 Although other scholars have called McConnell’s original-intent thesis into question, generally their critiques have disputed his finding that religious exemptions are constitutionally mandated, not his evidence of statutory religious exemptions in the colonial and pre-constitutional periods.57 At the very least, then, McConnell provides a cogent defense of the idea that traditional interpretations of religious free exercise incorporated the notion of exemptions to generally applicable laws.58	cache/cjrl-2315.pdf	txt/cjrl-2315.txt