Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord Thy God in Vain: Use and Abuse of Religious Exemptions from School Immunization Requirements
![handle is hein.journals/hastlj65 and id is 1663 raw text is: Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord Thy
God in Vain: Use and Abuse of Religious
Exemptions from School Immunization
Requirements
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS*
School immunization requirements are one way that states protect school age children
against vaccine-preventable diseases. At present, forty-eight states allow parents to
exempt their students from immunization requirements based on religious reasons,
philosophical reasons, or either. This Article focuses on the religious exemption and
makes three points. First, people lie to get a religious exemption. Second, U.S.
jurisprudence makes preventing such abuse very hard. And third, because the religious
exemption is so prone to abuse, we should remove it. The first part of the Article
discusses the jurisprudence, and why our courts limit state officials' ability to police
abuse of the religious exemption. The Article then uses three sources to argue that
religious exemptions are widely abused: survey data describing the reasons people do
not vaccinate, the positions of established religions about vaccines, and posts from
Facebook stating the poster lied to obtain a religious exemption. The Article concludes
by discussing three potential solutions to the problem of widespread abuse of the
religious exemption: tightening the scrutiny of requests for religious exemptions,
limiting exemptions to medical exemptions only, and providing only a personal choice
exemption. The Article is skeptical about whether tightening scrutiny is appropriate or
constitutional, but sees the latter two options as offering a different balance of benefits
and costs, though the author has a slight preference for a hard to obtain personal
choice exemption.
* Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law. I am grateful to
Hadar Aviram, Kate Bloch, Ben Depoorter, Bill Dodge, Craig Egan, Chimene Keitner, David Levine,
Radhika Rao, Reuel Schiller, Jodi Short, David Takacs, Bill Wang, Alice Warning Wasney, Narad
Trabant, and Lois Weithorn for their help with this Article. Many thanks to Jessica Cassella, David
Coolidge, and Rob Taboada for their excellent help in researching this topic.
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