In dismissing his case, Circuit Chief Judge Richard A. Posner offers what Fox describes as «a handy history of the ministerial exception, including a historical sojourn through
such ecclesiastical courts as the Court of Peculiars and the Court of Arches.»
Not exact matches
As an astute lawyer of your calibre and with your long association with the British legal system, I am very sure you know of the latter enactment, by declaring the
court of High Commission, which James 11, had endeavoured to reestablish under the name of the commissioners for
Ecclesiastical Caucus, to be illegal, put an end for ever to the attempts of the crown to set up
courts where men might be tried in an uncertain and arbitrary manner, and which had proved
such a fertile source of tyranny in the case of the then star chamber.
In this class of cases, we think the rule of action which should govern the civil
courts, founded in a broad and sound view of the relations of church and state under our system of laws, and supported by a preponderating weight of judicial authority, is that whenever the questions of discipline or of faith or
ecclesiastical rule, custom, or law have been decided by the highest of these church judicatories to which the matter has been carried, the legal tribunals must accept
such decisions as final and as binding on them in their application to the case before them.