Becket Fund files Supreme Court Amicus Brief in AID v. AOSI The legal issue is a critical one because the government attaches many conditions to the receipt of federal funds.

Prof. Eugene Volokh filed an amicus brief on behalf of The Becket Fund and Christian Legal Society in AID v. AOSI today. In our brief, we argue that it is not “consistent with the First Amendment for the government to condition the receipt of a grant on the recipient’s agreement to make an affirmative policy statement that may be antithetical to the recipient’s beliefs.” Check out the blog post on The Volokh Conspiracy here:

I’m pleased to report that my Mayer Brown LLP colleagues Andrew Frey and Michael Rayfield and I have just filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the Christian Legal Society in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, which will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court later this month.

SCOTUSblog has a summary of the case by Prof. Stephen Wermiel here:

The legal issue is a critical one because the government attaches many conditions to the receipt of federal funds. The leading case is one decided by the Supreme Court in 1991, Rust v. Sullivan. The case involved federal funds appropriated for family planning services. To implement the part of the law that prohibited use of federal funds for abortion as a means of family planning, in 1988 the Department of Health and Human Services issued regulations prohibiting organizations that received funds from counseling about or advocating for abortion or from referring patients to abortion providers. Just as in the case of the anti-prostitution rule, family planning organizations were allowed under the regulations to maintain entirely separate, independent abortion counseling programs that had separate staffs, facilities, budgets, and recordkeeping.