This memo provides a brief overview of religious liberty laws, details the history of legal claims using a religious liberty right to abortion, and explores how such claims might be made today.

This report presents new research that hospitals across the region strictly regulate the provision of abortion, leading to delays and denials of care for patients facing severe pregnancy complications.

This legal explainer explores how religious exemption measures threaten more than just LGBTQ and reproductive health, and can limit or significantly undermine workers’ rights, public health, environmental welfare, emergency response, religious pluralism, and other crucial interests.

This report shows that the Supreme Court’s COVID-era opinions have created a hierarchy of constitutional rights, with religious rights at the top.

This report offers policymakers guidance on how to protect freedom of conscience for all, not merely for a favored few. The report is accompanied by a media guide for journalists suggesting ways to think about and hone questions for policymakers and advocates claiming to protect religious liberty.

Professor Katherine Franke joins amicus brief with eight other scholars of church-state law filed in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia.

LRRP Director Elizabeth Reiner Platt explores the Trump administration’s continued assaults on progressive rights of conscience.

A comprehensive report documenting the many contexts in which people of faith engaged in humanitarian and social justice work have fought for the right to exercise their religion.

LRRP Faculty Director Katherine Franke penned this amicus brief in support of Rev. Kaji Douša, who sued DHS, CBP, ICE, and the people leading these agencies after they retaliated against her for providing pastoral services to migrants and refugees.

LRRP and fellow legal scholars file brief in case in which the Department of Justice rejects religious liberty rights of non-profit that provides safe space to injection drug users.

Today, during his National Day of Prayer remarks, President Trump announced a finalized rule that creates expansive legal protections for healthcare providers with specific religious beliefs, including opposition to abortion, sterilization, end-of-life care, and healthcare for LGBTQ persons.

Nationally recognized law professors with expertise in religious liberty law filed an amicus brief in the appeal of the convictions of four sanctuary activists who were found guilty in the crime of leaving water and food in the desert for migrants.

Prof. Katherine Franke joined an amicus brief in a case challenging rules that exempt employers with religious/moral objections from compliance with the contraceptive coverage requirement of the Affordable Care Act. The brief explains that these rules conflict with constitutional religious liberty law by requiring employees to bear the cost of their employer's beliefs.

LRRP’s Founding Director, Katherine Franke, filed two amicus briefs in support of activists from the migrant relief group No More Deaths.

Five prominent professors of law and religion, including LRRP’s Founding Director, Katherine Franke, filed an amicus brief in support of Dr. Scott Warren, a humanitarian aid worker who faces up to twenty years in prison for providing food and shelter to migrants crossing the Arizona desert.

This report outlines the ways in which a guidance document issued by the Trump-era Attorney General interprets and expands religious liberty laws in a way that elevates the right to religious exemptions over other legal and constitutional rights. The guidance has been used to limit access to reproductive health care and threatens to limit enforcement of various health, employment, and anti-discrimination protections.

“Under [HHS’s] proposed rule, a doctor who refuses to provide care that is medically indicated and requested by a patient is protected, while a doctor who does provide this care in accordance with her conscience can be fired.”

–LRRP Director Liz Platt

This report presents data showing that in many states, women of color disproportionately give birth in Catholic hospitals that place religious restrictions on care—even during medical emergencies. Such restrictions stand to exacerbate the existing disparities women of color already face in accessing quality reproductive health care.

The report details the increased risks LGBT older adults face as a result of recent religious exemption laws and policies.

LRRP joined Muslim Advocates and 13 other faith and civil rights organizations in urging the Supreme Court to reject a bakery's claim that religious belief justified refusing service to a same-sex couple, arguing that anti-discrimination protections are not in tension with religious liberty, but essential to it.