Scalia’s Prophecy Fulfilled (Sub Silentio)

This post is from Anglican Curmudgeon which you can find here.

An excerpt of the Anglican Curmudgeon post is as follows: “Sub silentio (literally, “under [the cloak of] silence”) is a legal term of art for the technique of a court that, say, wants to accomplish something like the overruling of an earlier case — without having to admit in express words what it is doing. For whatever political or collegial considerations prevail at the moment, the court finds it more “convenient” to stop short of saying what it is doing, while doing it nonetheless. Then, either a few (or even many) years later, the court can “discover”, say, that the case of W. vs. X was in fact overruled, sub silentio, by the case of Y vs. Z.

Courts also understandably shy away from overturning their own prior decisions. As Justices O’Connor, Kennedy and Souter noted in declining to overrule Roe v. Wade in the later case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 844, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992), ‘Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.”’

You can learn more about this issue here.

Clash of the Canons and Civil Law at GTS

This post is from Anglican Curmudgeon which you can find here.

An excerpt of the Anglican Curmudgeon post is as follows: “The recent meltdown at the country’s oldest theological seminary (and the only Episcopal seminary under the direct supervision of ECUSA) puts to the test some of the canonical abuses and litigation strategy implemented in the last few years by the Church’s leadership at 815 Second Avenue. Eight of the ten full-time faculty employed by General Theological Seminary declared in a September 17 letter to the Board of Trustees that due to the “hostile work environment” created by the Seminary’s Dean and President, the Very Rev. Kurt H. Dunkle, they were unable to continue to work under him.

The phrase “hostile work environment” is drawn from the well-developed body of labor law enforced in the United States by the National Labor Relations Board. However, ever since a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1979, the NLRB’s jurisdiction has been held not to extend to religious schools and their faculties (including lay faculty), due to concerns over entanglement with religious rights under the First Amendment. Just as with all the recent Church property disputes, ECUSA has been at the forefront of insisting that the civil courts must defer to it in all civil litigation involving its religious affairs, governance and operations.”

You can learn more about this issue here.