| This study analyzes the colloquy among Congress, the Supreme Court and other stakeholders on the meaning of the First Amendment's free exercise clause.;By tracing the evolution of the Court's free exercise jurisprudence during the modern and traditional eras, Congress' response to the Court's interpretation of the free exercise clause, and later, the lower court response to Congress, this work explores how each institution interprets the meaning of this particular constitutional provision. It uses a US Supreme Court case, Employment Division v. Smith to illustrate the dialogue that resulted from the 1990 decision to review how Congress and the Court differ in their interpretative process. Exemplary of this dialogue is the resulting RFRA and subsequent lower court decisions.;By analyzing two conflicting theories of constitutional interpretation--judicial supremacy and coordinate construction, this study explores some of the difficulties inherent in the theory of judicial supremacy in order to illustrate how the theory of coordinate construction more appropriately explains the process of constitutional interpretation. The premise of this study is that the dialogue over constitutional meaning was not only intended by the framers and is warranted by constitutional design, but that it also leads to an enriched understanding of the principles inherent in the Constitution. This work contends that an ongoing dialogue about the meaning of the Constitution leads to an interpretation of the document that is more readily accepted by the public and other government institutions, and is, therefore, inherently democratic. |
