The Upside-Down Treatment of Religious Exceptions Cases in the Supreme Court

MICHAEL C. DORF

Cornell law professor Michael C. Dorf comments on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week to reject an emergency application from the State of Alabama to lift a stay on the execution of Willie B. Smith III. Professor Dorf observes the Court’s unusual alignment of votes in the decision and argues that, particularly as reflected by the recent COVID-19 decisions, the liberal and conservative Justices have essentially swapped places from the seminal 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, which established that the First Amendment does not guarantee a right to exceptions from neutral laws of general applicability.

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Kraus v. Saul

Docket: 19-3337

Opinion Date: February 19, 2021

Judge: William Duane Benton

Areas of Law: Public Benefits

The Eighth Circuit affirmed the denial of disability insurance benefits and supplemental social security income to plaintiff. The court held that substantial evidence supported the ALJ's decision to give little weight to plaintiffs' treating physicians because their opinions were vague and imprecise and did not provide any function-by-function analysis. Furthermore, substantial evidence supports the ALJ's decision to give greater weight to the medical consultants' opinions than to the treating physicians' opinions. Finally, the vocational expert's answer to the first hypothetical question, regarding whether a hypothetical person—who could lift amounts that plaintiff could, sit and stand for periods that she could, and work in a workplace devoid of fumes that irritated her—could work, is substantial evidence because it is a response to a hypothetical with the impairments accepted as true by the ALJ and reflected in the residual functional capacity (RFC). However, the vocational expert's answer to the second hypothetical question, regarding whether a hypothetical person with the impairments plaintiff alleged could work, was not substantial evidence because the hypothetical person in the second hypothetical did not have the same RFC as plaintiff.