Title: Religious Freedom Page

Source/Sponsoring Agency: Hadden, Jeffrey K.

URL: http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~jkh8x/relfree/home.html

Date Checked:       Status: Active

Date Annotated: 7/27/99

Topics: Constitutional Law; Human Rights Law; Religion

Other keywords: First Amendment

Contents: The Religious Freedom Page is written and maintained by University of Virginia professor of sociology Jeffrey K. Hadden. The page has an explicit purpose to promote the author's belief that "religion is the final line of defense against every form of tyranny" and that "religious freedom is the first liberty." The site, although incomplete, is well-designed and well-maintained, with an intuitive user interface, nice graphic layout and an easily navigable table of contents. The Religious Freedom Page has a limited number of links to U.S. constitutional material, but has annotations of landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions, divided into categories such as "Government Intervention" and "The Free Exercise of Religion." The site links to outside web pages that may contain the full text of the decisions. Although the page states that its intent is to be international in scope, almost all of the substantive material available on it is U.S. The Religious Freedom Page also examines the status of religious freedom for every nation in the world, using information from such sources as the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1998, U.S. Department of State and the World Factbook (1996).

Author of Annotation: B.N. Whittington