|
|
Examining a series of court decisions made during the 1980s regarding the legal claims of several Native American tribes who attempted to protect ancestrally revered lands from development schemes by the federal government, this book looks at important questions raised about the religious status of land. The tribes used the First Amendment right of free exercise of religion as the basis of their claim, since governmental action threatened to alter the land which served as the primordial sacred reality without which their derivative religious practices would be meaningless. Brown argues that a constricted notion of religion on the part of the courts, combined with a pervasive cultural predisposition towards land as private property, marred the Constitutional analysis of the courts to deprive the Native American plaintiffs of religious liberty. Brown looks at four cases, which raised the issue at the federal district and appellate court levels, centered on lands in Tennessee, Utah, South Dakota, and Arizona; then it considers a fifth case regarding land in northwestern California, which ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In all cases, the author identifies serious deficiencies in the judicial evaluations. The lower courts applied a conception of religion as a set of beliefs and practices that are discrete and essentially separate from land, thus distorting and devaluing the fundamental basis of the tribal claims. It was this reductive fixation of land as property, implicit in the rulings of the first four cases, that became explicitly sanctioned and codified in the Supreme Court's decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association of 1988. In reaching such a position, the Supreme Court injudiciously engaged in a policy determination to protect government land holdings, and did so through a shocking repudiation of its own long established jurisprudential procedure in cases concerning the free exercise of religion.
|
Add
Your Review!
Read more reviews from Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com
|
|
|
|
|
 Other titles you may be interested: |
|
|
» Add BookFinder4U to your browser's Favorites
» Add BookFinder4U to your online bookmarks:     |
Page loading time: 0.296875 sec. | URL: http://www.bookfinder4u.com/detail/0313309728.html
©2008 BookFinder4U.com
Compare 130 bookstores - All rights Reserved.
Disclaim: Part of content on this site is properties of their respective
owners and copyright holders. Bookfinder4u will not under any circumstances
be liable to you or any other person for any loss due to the use of these
content. Some of the content that we make available to you through this
website comes from amazon web services. All such content is provided to
you "as is." this content and your use of it are subject to
change and/or removal at any time.
Privacy
Commitment Conditions of Use
|
Larger Image
