Selling Land and Religion
NGOV FINAL.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 11/7/2012 5:09 PM Selling Land and Religion Eang L. Ngov* I. INTRODUCTION Over the course of decades, thousands of religious monuments have been donated to towns and cities. Local, state, and federal governments now, as a result of Pleasant Grove City v. Summum,1 have greater freedom to accept or reject religious monuments, symbols, and objects2 donated to them for display in public spaces without violating the Free Speech Clause of the Constitution.3 In Pleasant Grove City, the city displayed a donated monument of the Ten Commandments in its public park but rejected a monument of the Seven Aphorisms donated by Summum, a religious organization.4 The Supreme Court characterized displays of monuments in public spaces as government speech, which * Associate Professor, Barry University Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law. B.A., magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, University of Florida; J.D., University of California at Berkeley School of Law. For Jade. I thank Leslie Griffin, Frederick Jonassen, John Kang, Heather Kolinsky, Judith Koons, Bruce Ledewitz, Daniel P. O’Gorman, and Enrique Guerra Pujol for their insightful comments and conversations. I am grateful for the excellent research assistance of Rania Arwani, Christopher A. Bailey, John Berry, Bernice Bird, Jenna Goodwin, Laura Johnson, Lance Leider, Jacqueline Smith, Vanessa Tuttle, and Christopher Wright, and of Law Reference Librarians Patricia Brown, Ann Pascoe, Louis Rosen, and Nancy Strohmeyer. Linda Cahill provided invaluable IT support. This Article was made possible by the financial support of the Barry University School of Law Summer Research Grant.
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