The Status of Religious Arbitration in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses, and challenges, the status of religious arbitration in the United States and Canada. Religious arbitration - defined as the settling of disputes informally by religious principles, rather than by having recourse to the courts - has been written about considerably in recent years. Many writers have argued that religious arbitration can be used to enhance religious freedom, and have discussed how secular rights can be protected before religious tribunals. This article makes the opposite argument. It examines religious arbitration by looking at constitutional law on free exercise in the United States and Canada, and argues that religious arbitration agreements and awards have a limiting effect on religious freedom. Therefore, these agreements and awards should only be enforced in civil courts when courts are not competent to handle the disputes themselves. Courts lack the required competence when the subject-matter of the dispute is inherently religious. In such situations, the freedom-promoting aspect of a court’s enforcement of a religious arbitration agreement or award outweighs the negative effect on freedom of religion, because the courts can provide necessary support for religious institutions. However, when the subject-matter of a dispute is entirely secular, there is no such benefit for freedom of religion. Therefore, freedom of religion is constrained by binding religious arbitral agreements and awards on secular matters, and courts should decline to enforce such agreements or awards.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".