Canopy Forum: RFRA at 30

On Thursday at 10:30 am Central, the Canopy Forum is hosting a webinar entitled "The Religious Freedom Restoration Act at 30." While it is not specifically geared toward answering nonprofit or tax-exempt organization questions, religious organizations are a huge, and important, sector of the nonprofit world, attracting more than 25% of charitable donations in 2021. So even if the discussion of RFRA doesn't directly address questions of nonprofit law, it's an important law dealing with an important corner of the nonprofit world. (Full disclosure: I'll be talking about RFRA and religious tax protestors.) An abstract for the webinar:

Thirty years ago this November, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). RFRA was birthed from a popular bipartisan effort in Congress to respond to Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld as constitutional under the Free Exercise Clause facially neutral and generally applicable laws. Soon after its enactment, RFRA’s scope came under dispute. Today, the contours of the federal statute—and its state law progeny—continue to be a source of litigation and scholarly discussion. This one-day symposium will look back at RFRA’s origins and evolution and look forward to its new frontiers.

If you're interested, you can register here.

Samuel D. Brunson