Louisiana recently enacted a law requiring that the text of the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public-school classroom. Almost immediately afterwards, the ACLU filed a lawsuit complaining that the regulation violated the First Amendment. Once, the ACLU would have had a near-airtight case, but a 2022 Supreme Court ruling has changed the way the First Amendment is applied in such instances, and this lawsuit will test the new doctrine. Michael A. Helfand explains that there are two reasons the law might still fail to pass muster:

First, in its most recent decisions, the current Supreme Court has been clear that government still cannot enact laws that are religiously coercive. . . . And at least in the past, the Supreme Court has construed the concept of religious coercion broadly, to . . . encompass laws that don’t quite force others to participate in a religious practice. For example, in 1992, the Supreme Court held that a religious prayer at a public-school graduation—technically a program where attendance is voluntary—violated principles of church-state separation because it constituted a form of “subtle pressure” on students to attend and participate.

Second, the court has also previously held that “denominational preference”—that is, enacting laws that prefer one religion over others—also violates the First Amendment. . . . Louisiana’s law explicitly chooses a version of the Ten Commandments that differs in text and emphasis from the version embraced by various Jewish and Christian denominations. Moreover, the very idea of privileging the Ten Commandments in the classroom might constitute a preference for the Judeo-Christian tradition over and above the traditions of other faith communities.

As Israel moves closer to dismantling Hamas’s rule in Gaza, it will soon have to start implementing an alternative form of local governance. To do so it will likely draw on a confidential report produced by a team of Israeli scholars that has been circulating in the highest ranks of the government and military for the past few weeks.

One of the report’s authors, Netta Barak-Corren, discussed some of its suggestions recently with Dan Senor, addressing what can be learned from what the U.S. got right in Japan and Germany after World War II, and got wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan: