Free exercise jurisprudence is unique in constitutional law. Because direct regulation of religious activity almost never occurs, the litigation surrounding free exercise addresses only incidental and inadvertent regulation of religious conduct. For this reason, the issue in a free exercise challenge typically is not whether a law is constitutional; the law under attack is usually constitutionally unassailable outside of its incidental effect on religious practice. Rather, the issue is whether certain individuals should be exempted from otherwise valid, neutral laws of general applicability solely because of their religious conviction. The jurisprudence of free exercise, in short, is the jurisprudence of the constitutionally compelled exemption.

There are a number of tensions underlying the notion of constitutionally compelled exemption and underlying the constitutional treatment of religion and religious belief, that make free exercise jurisprudence a particularly difficult subject for coherent analysis. First, because special exemptions of any kind raise concerns of undue favoritism, they are normally suspect as violating fundamental constitutional principles of equal treatment. Thus, as the Court noted recently, the conclusion that the Constitution may require the creation of an exemption directly contradicts the constitutional norm.

The position of object and adverbial clitics remains problematic in Old Occitan syntax (Wanner 2010). This paper analyzes clitic position specifically in affirmative main declaratives with overt preverbal subjects, in which clitics are either preverbal or postverbal with no apparent semantic distinction. Thus, the phrases En Constantiss’enanet and En Constantis anet s’en are semantically equivalent, each meaning ‘Sir Constantine left’, whether the clitics s’en ‘himself.from-there’ appear before or after the verb anet ‘went’. Previous analyses have concluded that this variation is random (Mériz 1978) or due to regional or dialectal variation (Hinzelin 2007). Neither approach satisfactorily addresses the underlying grammar or the principles underlying the distribution of the variants. The present analysis draws on claims about the left periphery in medieval Romance (Benincà 2006) and reports empirical data from the troubadour biographies (vidas and razos) and the vida of Saint Douceline. Results from 470 subject–verb declaratives establish that the subject in subject–verb–clitic sequences is left-dislocated, albeit covertly so. This sequence is one of several instantiations of subject left dislocation in Old Occitan and usually signals topic shift.

We address variable morphotactics, the phenomenon of order variability of morphs, in the context of inflectional morphology. Based on an extended discussion of cross-linguistic variation, including conjugation in Nepali, Fula, Swahili, Chintang and Italian, and nominal declension in Ostyak and Mari, we propose a canonical typology that identifies different deviations from strict ordering. Following a discussion of previous approaches to the problem, we propose Information-based Morphology, an inferential-realisational and model-theoretic approach to morphology couched in a logic of typed feature structures. Within this formal theory, we develop detailed analyses of the core cases in the typology and show how different types and degrees of deviation from the canon can be pin-pointed in the relative complexity of the rule type hierarchies that model the data. Furthermore, we show that complex deviations, as attested in Mari, can be understood as combinations of more basic deviations.

This paper uses two manuscript tracts to reconstruct the vision of the English polity underpinning Lord Burghley's interregnum proposals of 1584–85. These proposals famously prompted Patrick Collinson's work on “the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I,” which in turn became embroiled in subsequent attempts to recuperate distinctively “republican” strands of thought and feeling in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Written by two clients of central figures in the regime, the two texts are replies to a tract by John Leslie outlining Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne. This tract was republished in 1581 in Latin and then in 1584 in English as part of a Catholic propaganda offensive of the summer of 1584 to which, in turn, the Bond of Association and the interregnum scheme itself were responses. By comparing different versions of the two texts with one another and with Thomas Bilson's later printed tract, The true difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion, something like the structuring assumptions, indeed the political thought, underlying the interregnum scheme can be recovered and analyzed and the republican nature of the monarchical republic assessed in detail for the first time.