Putting Religious Symbolism in Context: A Linguistic Critique of the Endorsement Test

Abstract

The Supreme Court's jurisprudence concerning public displays of religious symbols is notoriously unpredictable. In this Article, Professor Hill argues that the instability and apparent incoherence of the Supreme Court's religious symbolism jurisprudence is due to certain difficulties inherent in discerning the or message of a religious display. In particular, she attributes the unpredictability of the jurisprudence to the fact that the of the display is dependent on the context, which is itself an unmanageable and unformalizable concept. This Article, which draws on insights from literary and linguistic theory, breaks with previous commentators' claims that the difficulties with the Court's jurisprudence in this area are due to doctrinal incoherence, thinly veiled politics, or unconscious bias, arguing instead that the problems reflected by the Supreme Court's case law inhere in the task of discerning the social meaning of a religious display.