Publication Date

5-2026

Journal

Harvard Law Review Forum

Abstract

This Essay proceeds in four Parts. Part I traces the doctrinal baseline, showing that vaccines have long functioned as the limit case for religious liberty. Part II briefly describes the doctrinal changes of the COVID-19 era — the Supreme Court’s expansion of religious equality doctrine, and its emergency-docket denials that left vaccine mandates formally unresolved — before explaining why the GVR in Miller signals a different move: the extension of the religious liberty framework to vaccine mandates, bypassing the comparability analysis that had allowed most courts to sustain them under the equality model. Part III turns to Miller itself and the Second Circuit’s decision upholding New York’s repeal of its religious exemption. Part IV returns to the Miller GVR as a window into the Court’s broader practice of communicating consequential legal directions through orders, and argues that the GVR is best understood as doing substantive doctrinal work by treating Mahmoud as bearing on vaccine mandates. In doing so, the GVR unsettles a century-old premise about religious liberty and children’s health and forces the lower court into an interpretive bind, given that the Court has not squarely repudiated the older baseline.

Volume

139

Issue

7

First Page

285

Last Page

304

Publisher

Harvard Law School

Disciplines

Constitutional Law | First Amendment | Health Law and Policy | Jurisprudence | Law | Religion Law | Supreme Court of the United States

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