When civil courts command religious tribunals, the republic errs

The National Review reports that a state court has ordered an Orthodox Jewish man to demand that a rabbinical court reverse a religious ruling — and that the Supreme Court's emergency docket has now been asked to intervene. The headline itself contains the difficulty: a civil tribunal issuing directions into a religious one. That is a posture the American constitutional settlement was designed to forbid.

I will state the principle as plainly as I can. Civil courts possess authority over the civil consequences of a dispute — property, contract, custody, enforcement of agreements the parties themselves chose to make binding in civil law. What they do not possess is the authority to reach inside a religious body and instruct it on the content or reversal of a religious judgment. The moment a court does that, it has not merely regulated conduct; it has presumed to govern doctrine. The distinction is not technical. It is foundational.

Consider what a well-constructed judiciary is supposed to do: say what the civil law requires, in cases properly before it, and then stop. Judicial restraint is not timidity — it is the discipline of staying within one's jurisdiction. A court that orders a litigant to go before a rabbinical tribunal and demand a different ruling has not exercised jurisdiction; it has exceeded it. It has substituted its judgment for that of an institution whose authority, in its own sphere, the state has no standing to revise.

The emergency docket is, I acknowledge, a blunt instrument — one I would counsel using with great caution, reserving it for circumstances where the ordinary course of appeal would itself constitute the injury. Whether this case meets that threshold is a question of procedural judgment I leave to those with the full record before them. What I will say is that if the facts as reported by National Review are substantially accurate, the underlying constitutional question is serious enough to warrant the Court's attention at whatever pace the harm demands.

There is a further dimension worth naming. The litigant here is a member of a minority religious community exercising a centuries-old form of adjudication that his tradition holds to be authoritative. The state, in ordering him to seek reversal of that tribunal's ruling, is not standing neutral between competing claims. It is placing a thumb on the scale against religious self-governance. A republic committed to equal protection of the law must be as vigilant in guarding the ecclesiastical autonomy of minority faiths as it is in guarding any other liberty — perhaps more so, since minority communities have less political recourse when the majority's assumptions are embedded in a court order.

What should be done? The Supreme Court should accept review — through its ordinary docket if timing permits, through the emergency channel if the harm is immediate and irreparable — and should hold, clearly and without equivocation, that civil courts may enforce the civil dimensions of arbitration agreements but may not direct the internal deliberations of religious tribunals. The line is not always easy to draw in particular cases. But the principle that the line exists, and that crossing it violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free exercise, is not in serious doubt. The Court's task is to say so, firmly, and to leave the rabbinical court to its own jurisdiction.