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Defending the Faithful: Speaking the Language of Group Harm in Free Exercise Challenges to Counterterrorism Profiling |
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Murad Hussain [View as PDF]
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117 Yale L.J. 920 (2008).
Counterterrorism officials increasingly seek to scrutinize conduct and behavior
that they believe, however uncertainly, to be probative of terrorist activity. When such conduct-
based profiling specifically targets activity that is also expressive of Muslim identity, it may
inflict pervasive dignitary and stigmatic harms upon the American Muslim community. Those
seeking redress from such policies through litigation would find that existing constitutional
doctrine does not readily let judges account for group harms when balancing the interests at
stake. This Note, however, argues that Muslim plaintiffs can use the Free Exercise Clause
doctrine of “hybrid situations,” announced in Employment Division v. Smith, to plead that certain
profiles’ burdens upon their religiously motivated exercise of secular constitutional rights
threaten to subordinate their religious community as a whole.
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