Recent Trends in Religious Liberty Doctrine
Columbia Student Chapter
Speakers:
- Hannah Smith, The Becket Fund
- Professor Katherine Franke, Columbia Law
Speakers:
- Hannah Smith, The Becket Fund
- Professor Katherine Franke, Columbia Law
Columbia Student Chapter
Speakers:
Speakers:
James L. Dohr Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Katherine Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, race, religion, and rights. Franke is also the founder and faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, a think tank based at Columbia Law School that develops policy and thought leadership on the complex ways in which religious liberty rights interact with other fundamental rights.
Her most recent book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition (Haymarket, 2019) makes the case for racial reparations today by telling the story of experiments in South Carolina and Mississippi in the 1860s where freed people were given land explicitly as reparation for enslavement and then had it taken away by the government. Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (NYU Press, 2015) considered the costs of winning marriage for same-sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. Franke was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. In addition to her work at the Law School, she worked regularly in Palestine until the state of Israel banned her from reentry in the spring of 2018, citing her advocacy on behalf of the human rights of Palestinians. She also chairs the board of directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights, based in New York City.
Before coming to the Law School, Franke was an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School and the University of Arizona College of Law. From 1990 to 1991, she was the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Prior to that, she worked for the New York City Commission on Human Rights and founded the AIDS and Employment Project.
Senior Counsel, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
Senior Counsel Hannah Smith joined Becket in 2007 following two clerkships at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Ms. Smith was a member of the Becket legal team that secured victories in key U.S. Supreme Court religious liberty cases, including Holt v. Hobbs, 574 U.S. ___ (Jan. 20, 2015), where a unanimous Court held in an opinion authored by Justice Alito that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act requires prison officials to accommodate peaceful expressions of religious devotion; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 134 S. Ct. 2751 (June 30, 2014), where the Court held in a 5-4 opinion authored by Justice Alito that family-owned businesses enjoy religious liberty rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and that the HHS mandate violated the Act; and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, 132 S. Ct. 694 (2012), where a unanimous Court held in an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts that the “ministerial exception” under the First Amendment protects a church’s right to choose its own ministers.
Ms. Smith contributed to Becket's Supreme Court filings in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell (2015); Houston Baptist University v. Burwell (2015); Stormans v. Wiesman (2015); Michigan Catholic Conference v. Burwell (2015); Obergefell v. Hodges (2015); University of Notre Dame v. Burwell (2014); Wheaton College v. Burwell, 134 S. Ct. 2806 (2014); Little Sisters of the Poor v. Sebelius, 134 S. Ct. 1022 (2014); Bronx Household of Faith v. New York City Board of Education (2014), Elmbrook School District v. Doe (2014), Big Sky Colony v. Montana Department of Labor and Industry (2013), Sossamon v. Texas (2011), Arizona Christian School Tuition Association v. Winn (2011), Bronx Household of Faith v. New York City Board of Education (2011), Utah Highway Patrol Association v. American Atheists (2011), Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), and Salazar v. Buono (2010).
Ms. Smith has been featured on CNN, Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, The Sean Hannity Show, C-Span, EWTN, Al Jazeera America, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News and World Report, the Associated Press, National Review Online, Bloomberg News, NPR, BBC, the Laura Ingraham Show, the Rush Limbaugh Show, the Hugh Hewitt Show, BYU Radio, and many other publications and radio shows. She has been invited to speak on religious liberty at Harvard Law School, Princeton University, Stanford Law School, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Southern Methodist University Law School, Brigham Young University Law School, American University Washington College of the Law, and Central European University. And she has given briefings on religious liberty issues at the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, the Heritage Foundation, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the American Bar Association, and the National Constitution Center.
Ms. Smith received her B.A. from Princeton University, concentrating in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She graduated with honors from Brigham Young University Law School and was elected to the Order of the Coif. She served as Executive Editor of the BYU Law Review, as a research assistant for the BYU International Center for Law and Religion Studies, and as president of the BYU Federalist Society. BYU awarded her its Alumni Achievement Award for her work in the defense of religious freedom. Ms. Smith also received the J. Reuben Clark Law Society's Women-in-Law Leadership Award for her national leadership in defending religious liberty and advancing the contributions of Mormon women to the law.
Following law school and in between clerkships, she was an associate in private practice at Williams & Connolly and Sidley Austin in Washington D.C., representing clients before state and federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court in civil, criminal, and constitutional cases. Her private practice religious liberty work included the U.S. Supreme Court petition for certiorari in Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City (2003), as well as matters on behalf of Brigham Young University, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington D.C.
Ms. Smith served as a full-time volunteer missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in France and Switzerland. She currently serves as a member of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society International Board and as a member of the Deseret News Editorial Advisory Board. She writes on religious liberty issues in the Deseret News. Hannah and her husband John are happily married with 4 wonderful children.