The concept of religious neutrality is on the rise in Europe. Neutrality has become a concept central to European law, both at the level of the European Union (EU) and at the level of the Council of Europe. It also infuses a variety of national legal regimes based on secularism.
One of the central pillars of liberal constitutional democracy originating in the Enlightenment has been adherence to institutional secularism. Institutional secularism, which is well exemplified by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, requires sufficient separation between state and religion to allow for a pluralistic polity in which various religious and non-religious conceptions of the good can be accommodated in ways that sustain peaceful coexistence. In the American case, the Establishment Clause prohibits the state from embracing any particular religion or from preferring any of them over others. At the same time, the Free Exercise Clause guarantees freedom of belief and the right of every person to practice the religion of her choice. Other liberal constitutional democracies draw the line somewhat differently, with some like France requiring stricter separation between the state and religion, and others like the United Kingdom enshrining an official state religion that does not operate in any way that curtails the religious liberties of the religiously-diverse citizenry. The key to maintaining institutional secularism consists of the state and the public sphere operating, in substance, independently from religion, while in the private sphere affording a maximum opportunity for religions to thrive and to coexist. Consistent with the values of the Enlightenment, ideally religions should be completely depoliticized and removed from the public sphere in exchange for being guaranteed a privileged status within the private sphere.
In June of 2018, investigative journalist Rana Ayyub told the BBC, “The last few weeks I think I’ve witnessed hell because every morning I wake up and I see this stream of tweets with screenshots of a pornographic video with my image morphed on it.” The episode began when Ayyub, an Indian and Muslim investigative journalist, accepted an invitation from the BBC and Al Jazeera to discuss India’s protection of child sex abusers. At the time, an eight-year-old girl had just been raped, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), an Indian nationalist party, had marched in support of the accused rapist. The day after the interview, Ayyub experienced harassment and abuse on social media. But the next day, the abuse escalated when someone from the BJP texted Ayyub a link to a video that appeared to show Ayyub in a pornographic video. Ayyub watched the first few seconds of the video and froze. She quickly realized the video was fake, since she has curly hair, but she claimed that an average viewer would actually think it was real. Before long, the video was shared all across the internet and social media, and people even reached out to Ayyub in an attempt to pay her for sex. Ayyub suffered immediate effects from this episode, and she checked into a hospital because of horrible reactions from the stress. Now, Ayyub recognizes that she was the victim of a deepfake sex video.
A pregnant seventeen-year-old in Benton, Arkansas, has access to over a dozen doctors’ offices, several charities, and an adoption agency. Benton is a city of over 30,000 people, which likely makes good use of all these types of services. As the county seat of Saline County, Benton also serves as a judicial district, with easy access to state courts. A pregnant seventeen-year-old in Roland, Arkansas, has none of these services; and indeed, there is not much of anything in the town of about 800. A small town in Pulaski County, Roland boasts mostly churches and farms; the town does not even have a courthouse. Both these adolescents are a half-hour drive from Arkansas’s major abortion clinic, Little Rock Family Planning Services. In order for either of these minors to obtain an abortion without parental consent, they must file a petition for a judicial bypass in their county of residence. The county line between Benton and Roland means that the seventeen-year-old in Roland will have access to a judge who is familiar with the judicial bypass process, which allows a minor to consent to their own abortion, while the seventeen-year-old in Benton will either have to obtain parental consent or carry the pregnancy to term.
At the ninety-first Academy Awards in February 2019, streaming service Netflix earned its first Best Picture nomination for its film Roma. Though Roma ultimately failed to win, the fact that a streaming service was nominated for one of Hollywood’s biggest awards worried filmmakers who believed that films should only be viewed in a movie theater. As a result, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Academy), the organization that gives out the Academy Awards, or the “Oscars,” met in April 2019 to discuss potential changes to its eligibility rules to address this worry. Currently, films must be shown in a theater in Los Angeles County for one week to be eligible for an Academy Award. Proposed rule changes included lengthening this requirement from one week to as long as four weeks.
A company discovers that a user downloaded its copyrighted movie using BitTorrent. The company cannot identify the user but, luckily, it does have the user’s Internet Protocol address (IPA). Seeking to defend its copyright, the company sues for copyright infringement, listing a John Doe and his IPA as the defendant. The company then moves for expedited discovery to subpoena the user’s internet service provider (ISP) to identify the internet subscriber. Armed with the user’s identity, the company offers to settle. Some defendants agree to settle, perhaps because they were caught red-handed and are being offered an olive branch, or perhaps because they are innocent but fear protracted litigation.