ABSTRACT
In the field of religious liberty, federal narcotics legislation serves as a colorful example of a neutral and generally applicable law. The criminal justice system is required to administer the government’s “no drugs” policy in an unprejudiced fashion. The 1895 General Assembly of Pennsylvania did not enact a general neutral dress code statute; rather, the legislators in the state focused on religious dress, marks, emblems, and insignia. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, with a bench made up entirely of new justices than in Hysong, reviewed the Mennonite case in Herr. Professor Douglas Laycock explained that anti-religious-garb statutes targeting teachers in public schools in the United States “were enacted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to prevent Catholic nuns from teaching in public schools.” In 1990, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in reviewing this history, accepted “for the sake of argument the district court’s finding of fact that ‘anti-Catholicism was a significant factor’ in the passage of statute.”.
