Substantive Neutrality and Government-Sponsored Religious Speech

Laycock’s conclusions regarding the application of substantive neutrality to government-sponsored religious speech may strike some as surprising. While substantive neutrality leads Laycock to be a strong proponent of free exercise rights—to the point of supporting what some might consider favoritism toward religionFootnote ¹⁴—he has embraced a firmly separationist approach to official religious speech.Footnote ¹⁵ Laycock’s conception of substantive neutrality justifies both positions—particularly his position on official religious speech—and it is a powerful and persuasive approach to official religious expression.

As noted above, substantive neutrality is aimed at minimizing government interference with religious exercise and belief by ensuring neutral government incentives.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, when the question arises whether a religious believer should be entitled to an exemption from an otherwise broadly applicable law, Laycock has favored exemptions that reinforce private choice and that put believers on equal footing with those who have no religious objection to the law, at least when there are other secular exemptions.Footnote ¹⁷ As he explained early on, “[e]xemptions for secular interests without exemptions for religious practice reflect a hostile indifference to religion,” because denial of exemptions in such circumstances “reflects a legislative judgment that the free exercise of religion is less important than the demands of some special interest group of no constitutional significance.”Footnote ¹⁸

But his embrace of substantive neutrality has led Laycock to a more separationist perspective when it comes to official religious expression. When government endorses religion or a religious viewpoint, it encourages religious observance, at least to some degree.Footnote ¹⁹ This is the nature of endorsement.Footnote ²⁰ With respect to school-sponsored prayer, for example, Laycock explains that in hosting such prayer, “[g]overnment is taking a whole series of positions on religion,” including “that there is a God, that praying to God is a good thing, that all students are encouraged to join in prayer, that the form of prayer offered at the school is good or efficacious way to pray—maybe the best way to pray.”Footnote ²¹

Even with respect to so-called passive religious symbols on government property that do not involve a call to participation in worship or other religious activity, the problem of official encouragement remains. Quoting Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, Laycock has explained that “[g]overnments have long used monuments to speak to the public,” and that “[i]t certainly is not common for property owners to open up their property for the installation of permanent monuments that convey a message with which they do not wish to be associated.”Footnote ²² Moreover, “[b]ecause government is highly visible, and because its speech about religion is always heavily influenced by political motives, it cannot speak about religion without influencing and usually distorting the religious teachings it tries to promote—and implicitly or explicitly rejecting the religious teachings it does not promote.”Footnote ²³ Thus, government speech endorsing religion inevitably encourages religious belief or exercise, though it may also be counter-productive given its tendency to distort those beliefs.

Endorsement through official speech is constitutionally problematic, in Laycock’s view, not just because it encourages religious belief—and sometimes very specific, sectarian religious belief—but also because it does so in a way that eliminates the possibility of individual, private choice.Footnote ²⁴ Unlike when the government directs funds to individuals, who may then use those funds for religious or nonreligious services, or when the government distributes funds neutrally to religious and secular service providers, among which individual service recipients may freely choose, there is no opting out of a prominent public religious display—for example, of a large Latin cross in the middle of “a busy intersection.”Footnote ²⁵ Even in the case of school prayer, “[e]veryone in the room will either participate in the particular prayer the school or its appointed agent selected, or they will conspicuously not participate.”Footnote ²⁶ A student who wishes simply not to be put to this choice is out of luck. Moreover, unlike when government funds social services provided by religious entities, “there is no secular value added” in the case of religious speech; “[g]overnment is verbally supporting religion as religion.”Footnote ²⁷ And there is no value—in terms of religious free exercise or in terms of secular benefit—that is lost when the government declines to speak religiously.

Laycock’s theory persuasively reconciles the Free Exercise Clause with the Establishment Clause, viewing the two clauses as minimizing, in different ways, government interference with religious belief and conduct and advancing substantive liberty interests in both the exercise and the non-exercise of religion. This is surely one of its greatest strengths. But an overlooked virtue is that Laycock’s approach to government religious expression is also grounded in realism. Put simply, it is concerned with how symbols work, and what they mean, in the real world. It relies on an understanding of language and symbolism that avoids formalistic traps or wishful thinking. For this reason, his theory informs and resonates deeply with my own approach to religious symbolism and other public religious expression.

For example, while recognizing that of course some religious symbols—take the highly sectarian Latin cross—may have some secular meanings, Laycock distinguishes between these secondary secular usages and the cross’s obvious, overwhelmingly religious primary usage.Footnote ²⁸ It is a simple enough task to list nonreligious settings in which the cross has been used—as Justice Alito did in his American Legion opinion, referring to its use in advertising insurance companies and aspirinFootnote ²⁹—but relying on such a superficial observation to make a constitutional argument is simply to blind oneself to the reality of how actual believers and nonbelievers understand the cross, especially when it appears as a standalone symbol.

Or take the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District,Footnote ³⁰ in which Laycock and Christopher Lund authored an amicus brief on behalf of the Baptist Joint Committee and other religious groups, arguing that a public school football coach’s practice of praying publicly at the fifty-yard-line after games violated the Establishment Clause.Footnote ³¹ Drawing on the factual record below, Laycock and Lund explained that Kennedy’s prayer “put genuine religious pressure on his students. Whether or not he intended to do so, he clearly did so.”Footnote ³² Rather than focusing on the lack of formal coercion—as the majority in Kennedy did, noting for example that “Mr. Kennedy did not seek to direct any prayers to students or require anyone else to participate”Footnote ³³—Laycock and Lund’s brief recognized the reality that coaches carry enormous influence in high school settings, and that not all coercion or pressure is explicit and formal.Footnote ³⁴ They also explained that Kennedy could have taken practical measures to avoid placing “religious pressure” on students while still fulfilling his own religious obligation to pray—for example by simply waiting a few minutes until the students left, or praying in a different, less obvious location.Footnote ³⁵

This much-needed realism about government religious speech is also reflected in Laycock’s 2011 article, Government-Sponsored Religious Displays: Transparent Rationalizations and Expedient Post-Modernism. Footnote ³⁶ In that article, Laycock calls out the insincere claims that certain widely-known and obviously religious symbols and practices are actually secular, or have become secularized.Footnote ³⁷ For example, Justice Alito argues in Summum that monuments—such as the World Peace Prayer Fountain in Fayetteville, Arkansas—have multiple meanings, and therefore cannot be reliably viewed as religious. Laycock’s response cuts to the chase in classic Laycock fashion: “[W]hat is the message of the large bronze statue displaying the word ‘peace’ in many world languages …? There is simply no ambiguity there. The dominant message is ‘peace,’ and any other message is distinctly secondary.”Footnote ³⁸ He thus rightly rejects the many instances in which justices, likely seeking to avoid an inevitable conclusion of unconstitutionality, engage in contorted logic to argue that governmental expressions such as a Latin cross or the assertion that the United States is “one nation under God” are lacking in ascertainable religious content.Footnote ³⁹

Laycock’s focus on neutrality of “incentives” likewise demonstrates his focus on how governmental actions resonate among actual people in the real world.Footnote ⁴⁰ Determining whether a law is neutral in terms of the incentives it creates to engage in or avoid religious observance requires common-sense judgments about how the world works. Thus, using the example of permitting children under the legal drinking age to take communion wine, Laycock observes that “[e]xempting communion wine from the ban on under-age consumption of alcohol is extraordinarily unlikely to induce anyone to become a Christian,” whereas threatening parents with criminal penalties for allowing their children to drink communion wine is quite likely to deter this form of observance.Footnote ⁴¹ These are not formalistic legal conclusions, but rather insights grounded in the reality of people’s lives, attitudes, and beliefs.

Thus, in a series of articles dealing with various forms of religious expression—religious symbolism, ceremonial deism, and the like—I have argued for an approach to such religious expressions that recognizes the importance of context in determining whether they violated the Establishment Clause.Footnote ⁴² The endorsement test, which was long the dominant legal framework for discerning the constitutionality of religious symbols and expression, asks whether the governmental speech or action “sends the … message to members of the audience who are nonadherents ‘that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.’”Footnote ⁴³ Laycock and I both appear to agree that the endorsement approach is the proper one and that the court was wrong to abandon it.Footnote ⁴⁴

To be sure, one might question whether Laycock’s theory sufficiently explains his views toward so-called passive religious symbols and expressions, particularly with respect to adult observers, who are situated quite differently from children in public schools. It is reasonable to argue that children, who are largely captive audience members in the school setting and who are often susceptible to peer pressure, will feel coerced to adopt the beliefs presented to them in that setting, or at least to conform their outward conduct to those beliefs.Footnote ⁴⁵ The approval of their peers is likely a strong incentive for adopting particular beliefs, and as explained above, children have no meaningful opt-out from school-sponsored or school-endorsed religious expression, such as the Ten Commandments displays that a state law in Louisiana requires to be posted in public schools.Footnote ⁴⁶ But what about adults who are free to come and go as they please? Can official religious expression really be said to have the same impact on them? Do such expressions truly incentivize them, or even put pressure on them, to change their belief systems? Do they lack any choice in the matter?

Realistically, it may be the case that not every instance of government religious expression encourages the observer to reconsider long-held religious beliefs. That said, the governmental act of endorsing religious beliefs—as opposed to simply acknowledging them, for example—entails that nonadherents to those beliefs will be out of alignment with the set of values and tenets officially held by those in power. While a city choosing to feature a Christian prayer at the start of every council meeting may not actually cause non-Christians with official business before that body to change their private beliefs, it may well encourage them not to wear their Judaism or atheism on their sleeves. The tendency to suppress alternative displays of religious (or non-religious) belief may also give the false impression that the officially endorsed views are more common than they are, which then perpetuates individuals’ inclination toward self-censorship. Indeed, while it is easy to point to examples on one end of the spectrum, in which the endorsement test seems to be an overstatement—does a holiday display in the city hall at Christmas really put pressure on visitors to change their views?Footnote ⁴⁷—it is just as easy to come up with alternative scenarios. If a city were to erect a permanent crucifix on the city hall, or to adopt the slogan “Springfield is a Christian town, with Christian values,” would it be so easy to dismiss the pressure that such expressions would place on nonadherents? What if every item of official communication—emails, websites, and letterhead—carried that message? It does not seem a stretch to suggest that citizens seeking political benefits from the government might try to conform their requests and their conduct to the expressed values.

Therefore, it should not be so easy to dismiss such expressions as merely passive. Governments speak for a reason. When they endorse a particular viewpoint—be it Christianity, democracy, or climate denial—they intend their expression to influence observers. While it may be simple enough to deny the persuasive impact of one or two stray religious observances, prominent and pervasive endorsements of Christianity are not so easy to dismiss. In endorsing one set of religious beliefs, as Justice O’Connor has argued, the government “sends a message” that adherents are political and social “insiders,” and others are on the outside.Footnote ⁴⁸ This message—a designation of outsider status—creates an incentive to conform one’s conduct to the insider religion to gain the benefits of political membership. A devout atheist may not adopt a belief in Jesus Christ after hearing an officially sponsored Christian prayer, but she may grit her teeth and feel that she is being untrue to herself as she sits in silence, leaving blatant falsehoods unrebutted.Footnote ⁴⁹ In other words, the incentive created by such expressions may or may not actually work as intended, just as it may or may not work in other contexts where government actions place pressure on religious entities to conform. Indeed, religious adherents—even children—have been known to be impervious to threats designed to encourage them to abandon their ways, even in the face of serious consequences.Footnote ⁵⁰ The point, in Laycock’s view, is not whether the government is successful in its bid for conformity, but rather whether it has put a thumb on the scale.Footnote ⁵¹

For these reasons, the endorsement test, while not without its flaws, asks the correct question: whether the government has acted in such as a way as to injure someone’s standing within the political community based on their religious beliefs or lack thereof. Moreover, the application of the endorsement test, which requires considering what the “reasonable observer” would understand about the display, in light of its history and context, is a useful test for implementing this principle.Footnote ⁵² It is sensitive to the physical setting, historical and recent events relevant to the display’s creation, and the composition of the community. This reasonable observer is therefore not, as Justice Gorsuch has suggested, “lazy, uninformed about history, and not particularly inclined to legal research.”Footnote ⁵³ Instead, the reasonable observer is simply a heuristic representing the act of interpreting social meaning; as a device, it signals that the court should take both text and context into account in determining whether the government has endorsed religion.Footnote ⁵⁴

Key to understanding how to interpret social meaning is the concept of “context.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This context may include not only the physical setting of the challenged display or message, but also the broader social and historical context.Footnote ⁵⁶ It thus looks not just to the text or symbol itself, but to what the text or symbol is likely to convey to observers. It is also concerned with impact, not abstract meaning or intent, and it is informed by facts on the ground.Footnote ⁵⁷ The endorsement test asks not just what the meaning of a religious symbol or expression is but also what “speech act” it is performing (is it endorsing, proselytizing, or merely acknowledging and depicting?), and it considers the effect of that expression on the political standing of community members.Footnote ⁵⁸

Finally, the endorsement test, properly understood, implicitly recognizes that the discernment of social meaning is inevitably bound up with power.Footnote ⁵⁹ The meaning and impact of governmental religious expression are shaped by the social context in which they occur; to take a fairly straightforward example, government sponsorship of Christian symbolism in a majority-Christian city is more likely to be understood as government endorsement of Christianity than government sponsorship of Jewish symbolism would be.Footnote ⁶⁰ In other words, social context shapes meaning, and social context may include facts such as the historical and political dominance of one religious group over others. This attention to social facts is thus another respect in which the endorsement test, and Laycock’s embrace of it through the concept of substantive neutrality, focuses not just on abstractions but on social reality and the functioning of government expression within that reality.

Despite the virtues of the endorsement test and the efficacy of Laycock’s support for it through his application of the substantive neutrality principle, the Supreme Court was often split over both its application and its applicability, and in 2022, the court officially announced its demise.Footnote ⁶¹ Unfortunately, the court’s turn away from the endorsement inquiry has proven problematic.

Realism and Abstraction in Establishment Clause Doctrine

Cracks began appearing in the endorsement test’s foundation nearly as soon as it was adopted. After Justice O’Connor introduced the test in a concurring opinion in the 1984 case Lynch v. Donnelly, a majority of the court applied it in the 1989 case Allegheny County v. ACLU. Footnote ⁶² Indeed, the endorsement test was often understood as a variation of the so-called Lemon test, which was the dominant (but again, not universally applied) test for Establishment Clause challenges.Footnote ⁶³ While the endorsement test had become largely defunct by the early 2000s, the court arguably applied something quite similar in the 2005 case Van Orden v. Perry. Footnote ⁶⁴ However, other tests—such as the coercion test, or the historical-practices-and-understandings test—competed with the endorsement test, as the court occasionally relied on these other tests in cases involving school prayer and legislative prayer.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ultimately, the court switched gears in American Legion v. American Humanist Association, abandoning any explicit inquiry into the social meaning of a religious display and instead adopting a presumption that longstanding monuments and displays are constitutional.Footnote ⁶⁶ Then, in 2022, the court officially declared both Lemon and the endorsement test overruled in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. Footnote ⁶⁷

These cases nearly span the entirety of Laycock’s career.Footnote ⁶⁸ As noted above, his scholarship and legal work have shaped the Supreme Court’s approach to free exercise, and today the Supreme Court’s approach to the Free Exercise Clause largely mirrors Laycock’s.Footnote ⁶⁹ On the Establishment Clause front, however, the court’s jurisprudence has moved in an entirely different direction, largely sacrificing anti-establishment values in favor of free-exercise values.Footnote ⁷⁰ This movement has coincided with the court’s move to the political right and its increasing embrace of originalism in the form of history-focused constitutional tests.Footnote ⁷¹

After Kennedy, what rules apply to Establishment Clause challenges to government-sponsored religious expression? When, if ever, is such expression unconstitutional? While Kennedy was not decided on Establishment Clause grounds, the court was required to decide whether the public high school football coach’s practice of praying at the fifty-yard line immediately after games violated the Establishment Clause in order to resolve his free-speech and free-exercise claims.Footnote ⁷² If the practice violated the Establishment Clause, the school district could have a compelling reason for overriding the coach’s rights to free speech and religious exercise.Footnote ⁷³ In determining that this was not the case, the court held that Establishment Clause questions should be resolved by reference to “historical practices and understandings,” rather than the endorsement test or any other of the doctrinal tests used in the past.Footnote ⁷⁴

The court did not provide much guidance on how to apply this new historical practices and understandings test—even in cases such as the one before it, involving public religious expression.Footnote ⁷⁵ While notably absent from Kennedy, further insight into the meaning of the historical practices and understanding test may, however, be found in legal scholarship that has in turn influenced the case law. In particular, in 2003, Michael McConnell published a careful, largely descriptive work of legal history that was aimed primarily at identifying key characteristics of what the founders likely considered to be religious establishments, based on their experience in England and with colonial religious establishments.Footnote ⁷⁶ In more recent years, this account has gained significant traction, as it has been increasingly cited by the Supreme Court.Footnote ⁷⁷ Additionally, scholars have turned to McConnell’s account to make prescriptive claims about the “hallmarks” of establishment, suggesting that the characteristics of early establishments at the founding must be present in order for a modern-day practice or law to be found to violate the Establishment Clause.Footnote ⁷⁸ These hallmarks fall into six categories: “(1) control over doctrine, governance, and personnel of the church; (2) compulsory church attendance; (3) financial support; (4) prohibitions on worship in dissenting churches; (5) use of church institutions for public functions; and (6) restriction of political participation to members of the established church.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In Shurtleff v. City of Boston, Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence referenced these hallmarks, arguing that they provided a suitable alternative to the Lemon analysis and a helpful gloss on “the Constitution’s original meaning,” thus “provid[ing] helpful guidance” for courts in the future.Footnote ⁸⁰

With respect to official displays of religious symbolism or official religious expression, it seems that only the first and second hallmarks could possibly have relevance.Footnote ⁸¹ Justice Gorsuch appears to argue that these hallmarks depend primarily (but perhaps not exclusively) on a showing of government coercion with respect to religion.Footnote ⁸² Thus, governmental religious speech is likely unconstitutional if it is coercive; indeed, the court stated three times in Kennedy that coercion was a “hallmark” of establishments at the nation’s founding.Footnote ⁸³ The Kennedy Court’s understanding of coercion, however, was not an exceedingly narrow one; rather than embracing an understanding of coercion that would require participation or conformity on threat of penalty,Footnote ⁸⁴ the court cited cases such as Lee v. Weisman and Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, which involved a broader understanding of coercion as potentially including something shy of direct legal coercion, at least when students are involved.Footnote ⁸⁵

Additionally, it seems reasonable to add a second limit to the government’s ability to engage in religious expression, drawn from the American Legion case. The Establishment Clause would also forbid showing intentional favoritism toward one religious group and disparaging others.Footnote ⁸⁶ As Justice Alito explained in American Legion, the original practice of congressional legislative prayer—which he deemed the most historically analogous practice to the public display of a Latin cross—demonstrated “respect and tolerance for differing views, an honest endeavor to achieve inclusivity and nondiscrimination, and a recognition of the important role that religion plays in the lives of many Americans.”Footnote ⁸⁷ And while this “nondisparagement” principle is not mentioned in Kennedy, it seems unlikely that the court would have meant to abandon it so quickly, a mere four years after establishing it, without even mentioning it in Kennedy. Footnote ⁸⁸ After all, the plurality also claimed to apply a history-centric approach in American Legion. Footnote ⁸⁹ So the best reading is probably that both Kennedy and American Legion govern.

To summarize, the court has not yet opened the door to all and any forms of public religious expression but rather continues to recognize that government-sponsored religious speech may sometimes violate the Establishment Clause. The court no longer applies an endorsement approach but does consider whether the speech is coercive or disparaging. Thus, on the whole, the court’s current approach may seem to differ in relatively minor ways from its prior approach. Instead of asking whether the speech endorses, the court asks whether it coerces (directly or indirectly) or disparages other religious and nonreligious viewpoints. This approach surely creates a narrower class of speech that may be found to violate the Establishment Clause, but it is a difference from the prior approach in degree rather than kind.

Or is it? Unfortunately, the court’s approach is also lacking in the nuance represented by the endorsement test. It does not consider real-world incentives, to use Laycock’s terminology, or the broader social context. For example, the court’s understanding of what constitutes coercion in Kennedy is formalistic, looking only for explicitly directive or persuasive conduct by the school officials rather than considering the broader social context in which the prayers occurred. For example, the court simply observed that no one “expressed any coercion concerns to the District,” nor was there “evidence” of pressure or coercion.Footnote ⁹⁰ The dissent, by contrast, engages in a much deeper dive into the facts of the case and engages the realities of student life.Footnote ⁹¹ In arguing that the Establishment Clause should be understood to bar the coach’s prayers, Justice Sotomayor’s dissent emphasizes the “public school context” and the unique pressures to which students are vulnerable.Footnote ⁹² In addition, the dissent takes a more realist approach to the likely impact on students of the coach’s public prayer, noting that “students face immense social pressure,” that they “look up to their teachers and coaches as role models and seek their approval,” and that a “coach’s approval may pay dividends small and large, from extra playing time to a stronger letter of recommendation to additional support in college athletic recruiting.”Footnote ⁹³ For this reason, “existing precedents do not require coercion to be explicit, particularly when children are involved.”Footnote ⁹⁴ We all know how the world works, don’t we?

In Kennedy, the history is flattened, reduced to a single narrative in which the framers were apparently univocal and transparent in their understandings of both religious establishments and the proper relationship between church and state. Thus, after briefly asserting that the Establishment Clause issue must be resolved by reference to history, the court in Kennedy immediately and with little explanation asserted that the key factor was the presence of coercion because coercion was a “hallmark” of eighteenth-century religious establishments.Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, although the presence of coercion has undoubtedly been used in the past to identify an Establishment Clause violation,Footnote ⁹⁶ Justice Gorsuch’s assertion in Kennedy was largely self-referential and lacking in foundation.Footnote ⁹⁷

In addition, the court’s “historical practices and understandings” approach does not clearly provide greater guidance or determinacy than the endorsement test or other social-meaning focused approaches, as Justice Gorsuch seems to suggest it should.Footnote ⁹⁸ As noted above, McConnell’s article primarily focused on describing the characteristics of religious establishments at the founding. But in order to use that descriptive account for identifying current-day Establishment Clause violations, an act of interpretation is inevitably required. Yet the turn to history, in the court’s hands, involves interpretive moves such as drawing on analogies that are not self-evident and not defended. For example, the Kennedy court’s historical analog for prayer by a public-school football coach is compelled religious observances at the founding—a reference to McConnell’s second hallmark involving compelled church attendance and financial support at the founding and in England before the founding.Footnote ⁹⁹ Because neither public schools nor compulsory education existed at the founding,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ it is not at all clear, nor is it explained, why compulsory attendance at and financial support for a church—requirements that were applied, of course, to adults—are appropriate analogies to religious expression in public schools.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Indeed, the example of compulsory church attendance and support is apparently used by Justice Gorsuch to extrapolate to a significantly broader, more controversial principle—that avoiding religious compulsion is the one and only principle animating the Establishment Clause analysis in cases dealing with official religious expression.

Reva Siegel, discussing the court’s turn to history in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has similarly noted that the court’s turn to history does not live up to its hype—specifically, the claim that it is a more determinate and objective form of interpretation that constrains judges from imposing their own preferences.Footnote ¹⁰² Instead, the court, in its completely unsystematic and untransparent appeal to historical practices and understandings, “offers no criteria for choosing” which laws, practices, or sources are relevant to its reconstruction of history, nor does it explain its methods for choosing those laws, practices, and sources.Footnote ¹⁰³ “The history-and-traditions framework is … a memory game that rationalizes the exercise of power. It functions to conceal rather than to constrain discretion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, say what you will about the reasonable observer heuristic—at least the court, in using this device to operationalize the endorsement test, was forced to confront just what the act of interpretation entails, what sort of information and what aspects of the context are relevant, and whose perspective matters.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The endorsement test, for all of its flaws, lays bare the interpretive device; the historical practices and understandings test conceals it, asserting legal conclusions based on a particular historical narrative and historical analogs derived by methods that are obscure.

So where does this leave us? The court has adopted an approach to official religious speech that seems to ask similar questions to the endorsement test but provides a narrower scope for finding unconstitutionality, trading a sensitivity to social context and incentives for a historical narrative of uncertain origin. This jurisprudence is surely the poorer for having left Laycock’s insights behind.