Religious Freedom in the U.S. Military: Historically and Today
Professor Joshua McDaniel (Harvard Law School) joins us to explore the history of religious accommodation in the armed services and how military officials and courts should evaluate service members’ religious accommodation claims in light of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Joshua C. McDaniel is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Faculty Director of the School’s Religious Freedom Clinic, where he supervises students representing a diverse group of religious clients. His areas of interest include civil rights and liberties, constitutional law, and religious freedom and free exercise issues, especially as those issues concern religious minorities. His latest research focuses on religious freedom in the military and the role religious minorities have played in securing free-speech and other secular constitutional rights.
Professor McDaniel is also an Associated Scholar with the Centre for Law and Religious Freedom at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.
Before entering clinical teaching, Professor McDaniel was a trial litigator at Munger, Tolles & Olson and an appellate litigator at Horvitz & Levy, where he specialized in representing individual and organizational clients in both commercial and civil rights cases, with particular expertise in First Amendment and religious freedom issues. He clerked for the Honorable Cormac J. Carney of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and the Honorable Jay S. Bybee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
While in private practice, Professor McDaniel received a Daily Journal 2022 California Lawyer Attorneys of the Year (CLAY) award, was twice named a “One to Watch” in appellate law by Best Lawyers, and argued in numerous appellate courts and courts of last resort, including twice before the California Supreme Court. His amicus brief for Jewish schools in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court was quoted by Justice Kavanaugh at oral argument.
Professor McDaniel earned his B.A., magna cum laude, from Brigham Young University and graduated first in his class from UCLA School of Law.