Yesterday, Notre Dame Law School’s Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic filed an Emergency Application to the U.S. Supreme Court. The application requests that the Court stay a New York state trial court order that directly intrudes on the free exercise of Samuel Strulovitch, an observant Orthodox Jew, by compelling him to violate his religious beliefs.
Consistent with his beliefs, Strulovitch brought a monetary dispute between two Jewish parties to a rabbinical court known as a beis din. He believes that his faith requires him to attempt to have the parties voluntarily agree to resolve the dispute under Jewish law.
The beis din, on its own initiative, then issued a seruv—a religious censure—against the other party, who had obtained a civil order enjoining Strulovitch from fulfilling his obligation under Jewish law to seek resolution in the rabbinical court. In the words of the rabbinic judges, they issued the seruv in response to the “chutzpah of enjoining a litigant from pursuing his Halachic [Jewish legal] rights to” adjudication of a dispute under Jewish law. Strulovitch believes that the beis din was right, as a matter of his understanding of Jewish law, to issue the seruv.
But a New York court has enjoined Strulovitch from seeking to resolve the dispute before the beis din. Worse still, the trial court has ordered Strulovitch to “take all steps necessary” to convince the beis din to withdraw the seruv, which he believes the rabbinical panel properly issued.
The application argues that this order squarely violates the First Amendment. Without the Supreme Court’s intervention, Strulovitch remains subject to an order that forbids him from practicing his faith in the manner he believes it requires. And it affirmatively conscripts him to lobby leaders of his own religion to change their minds on a matter of religious law that he believes they got right.
Alongside attorneys from Dechert LLP, including counsel of record and Notre Dame alumnus Michael McGinley, and Yitzchak Eliezer Soloveichik of Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC, our Clinic represents Strulovitch before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The state court’s order violates the First Amendment several times over,” said Meredith Kessler, managing attorney for the Clinic. “And it does this by impermissibly interfering with the religious affairs of an ecclesiastical body, which is beyond the power of civil courts.”
John Meiser, Faculty Director of the Clinic, added, “A court cannot forbid a believer from bringing a question to his own rabbis, let alone enlist him in an effort to change their minds on a matter of Jewish law. We hope the Supreme Court will correct this intrusion into affairs at the heart of the First Amendment.”
About the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Clinic
The Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic is a teaching law practice that educates, forms, and prepares Notre Dame law students to become the rising generation of religious liberty leaders by training students in the practice of law as they defend religious freedom for all people.
Under the guidance of Law School faculty and staff, students work on a broad variety of legal matters to promote religious freedom on behalf of individuals and organizations of all beliefs—both domestically and abroad. The Clinic represents clients from all faith traditions to promote not only the freedom for people to hold religious beliefs but also their fundamental right to express those beliefs and to live according to them. Learn more about the work of the Clinic here.