Olympic Law Group, PLLP-Tampa

11/15/2013

http://www.nytimes.com/

Bishops Select Two Leaders Who Reflect New Tone Set by Pope Francisy LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: November 12, 2013
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
GOOGLE+
SAVE
E-MAIL
SHARE
PRINT
REPRINTS

BALTIMORE — The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops on Tuesday chose as leaders of the bishop’s conference two prelates whose pastoral approach evokes the new tone for the church set by Pope Francis.
Related

Bishops Are Urged to Expand Priorities (November 12, 2013)
National Twitter Logo.
Connect With Us on Twitter
Follow for breaking news and headlines.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., the new president of the conference, has a master’s degree in social work, took care of his brother with Down syndrome and said the “most important time” he has ever spent was the 12 years he served as pastor in a parish.

“One of the major challenges is what our Holy Father has said over and over again, how can we warm hearts and heal wounds?” Archbishop Kurtz said in an inaugural news conference.

He will succeed Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, who finishes his three-year term on Thursday when the bishops’ meeting concludes. Cardinal Dolan, a garrulous evangelist comfortable in front of a camera, led the bishops in their high-profile confrontation with the Obama administration over a provision in the health care mandate that requires most employers to have insurance that covers contraceptives for employees.

In the bellwether contest for vice president, the bishops elected Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston from a slate of 10 candidates, some of whose vote counts were very close on the first and second ballots. In the runoff vote between two finalists, they passed over Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia, an astute writer who relishes politics and often weighs in from a conservative point of view. The vote was 147 to 87.

Among the other candidates defeated for vice president were Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, who has led the bishops’ religious liberty campaign to fend off what they see as serious threats to religious freedom, and Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, an immigrant from Mexico who has helped to lead the bishops in pushing for an overhaul of immigration law.

The bishops customarily elevate their vice president to president, so the election for this post often determines their leadership for years to come. Archbishop Kurtz had served as vice president under Cardinal Dolan, so his election was a return to a tradition overturned three years ago when Cardinal Dolan prevailed against the sitting vice president.

“The bishops have reverted to their pattern,” said Gregory Erlandson, president and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, a company that publishes various Catholic periodicals. “Archbishop Kurtz clearly has the esteem of his colleagues, and there was no evidence of opposition to his candidacy.”

They voted a day after hearing an address by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican’s ambassador, or nuncio, to the United States, who spoke of Francis’ vision for the church.

Archbishop Blase J. Cupich of Spokane, Wash., said in an interview after the vote on Tuesday: “The nuncio said the Holy Father wants bishops to have a keen pastoral sensitivity, shepherds who know the smell of the sheep. That’s a nice metaphor to use.

“Pope Francis doesn’t want cultural warriors, he doesn’t want ideologues,” he said. “That’s the new paradigm for us, and it’s making many of us think.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops represents about 450 bishops and sets the direction for the church’s ministry, public advocacy and political lobbying. At their meeting they also discussed a statement on po*******hy addiction and heard from Catholic Relief Services about the emergency in the Philippines after the typhoon.

Asked whether the bishops plan to be more vocal in their advocacy for the poor, Archbishop Kurtz said, “I believe we are very much in solidarity with Pope Francis on this.”

“We need not only to serve the voiceless and vulnerable, but to be an advocate,” he added.

A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2013, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Bishops Select Two Leaders Who Reflect New Tone Set by Pope.

11/15/2013

LEGAL/REGULATORY NOVEMBER 12, 2013, 11:19 AM 115 Comments
Justice Dept. Clears Merger of 2 Airlines
BY JAD MOUAWAD AND CHRISTOPHER DREW
A deal some saw as inevitable could be done this year.
Susan Walsh/Associated Press
A deal some saw as inevitable could be done this year.
After months of setbacks and delays, the merger of American Airlines and US Airways to create the world’s largest airline became all but certain on Tuesday after the airlines reached a settlement with the Justice Department just two weeks before a scheduled trial.

The deal paves the way for the creation of a third major global airline that can compete with United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, which completed their own mergers in recent years, and sets the structure for the domestic airline industry for years to come.

The combination caps a tumultuous decade for the airlines, which have been hobbled by high fuel prices and plagued by several bankruptcies, including American’s.

It also opens a chapter in the history of the airline industry’s deregulation, leaving a handful of airlines to control most domestic and international flights — American, Delta, United and the domestic giant Southwest Airlines.

Article Tools

FACEBOOK
SAVE
TWITTER
E-MAIL
GOOGLE+
PRINT
SHARE
PERMALINK
Related Links

Documents Document: Settlement in Airlines’ Merger Lawsuit
The Justice Department said the agreement would foster competition at busy markets like Washington and New York, opening opportunities for lower-cost carriers.

But analysts questioned how much competition would be created. George Hoffer, a transportation economics professor at the University of Richmond, said the merger effectively took one major competitor out of the market. That could result in subtle fare increases in many markets and fewer flights, he said.

Mr. Hoffer added that “the Justice Department was in an indefensible position. Once you created a super-Delta and a super-United, you had to create a super-American. So the outcome was inevitable.”

Investors cheered the deal, sending airline stocks higher after the announcement.

The settlement still needs to be approved by the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia and by the judge overseeing American’s bankruptcy proceeding. But the airlines are confident they can now close their merger by mid-December.

American and US Airways agreed to sell 104 takeoff and landing slots at Reagan National Airport in Washington, above.
Susan Walsh/Associated Press
American and US Airways agreed to sell 104 takeoff and landing slots at Reagan National Airport in Washington, above.
Airline executives have argued over the years that consolidation and pruning of unprofitable routes was the only way to return a beleaguered industry to health. The process has led to a string of mergers since 2005, including the combination between Delta and Northwest, United and Continental and, more recently, Southwest and AirTran.

While all those mergers were approved by antitrust regulators, with few or no objections, the planned combination of American and US Airways hit a major stumbling block this summer when the Justice Department, along with some state attorneys general and the District of Columbia, filed a legal challenge, contending that fares would rise if another merger went through.

But in the face of an effective lobbying campaign by the airlines and their employees, particularly with local and state officials, as well as the perceived weakness of their own case, government regulators dropped their suit in exchange for some divestitures.

Under the proposal, American and US Airways agreed to sell 104 takeoff and landing slots at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, and 34 slots at La Guardia Airport in New York to lower-cost carriers. They also agreed to sell the rights to a pair of terminal gates and associated ground assets at five other airports — Chicago O’Hare International, Los Angeles International, Boston Logan International, Dallas Love Field and Miami International.

The airlines also addressed a concern of the attorneys general that had joined the suit, agreeing to maintain hubs at Kennedy Airport in New York; in Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami; Philadelphia; and Phoenix for a period of three years “consistent with historical operations.” In a separate agreement with the Department of Transportation, the airlines agreed to maintain current service to small and midsize communities from Reagan National.

Robert Mann, an aviation consultant, said the deal was “basically a face-saver” for the Justice Department, which dropped its earlier objection over the possible loss of a low-fare program run by US Airways.

“But they did get a pound of flesh, or couple of ounces, at La Guardia and Washington National,” he said.

Airline executives, as well as labor groups that backed the merger, praised the deal. The slots to be sold represent about 15 percent of the combined slots at both airlines. Even after the divestitures, the new airline will have more flights from Reagan than US Airways, the current leader there, did before the merger and will remain the largest carrier there, said Doug Parker, the chairman of US Airways.

After the merger is completed, the airline will operate 6,700 flights per day. The sale of slots in New York and Washington, on the other hand, amount to 112 daily flights. “It’s pretty modest,” Mr. Parker said.

After completing the sale of its assets, the merged airline will operate 44 fewer daily departures from Reagan National Airport and 12 fewer daily departures at La Guardia than the two airlines together offer now. American and US Airways have 290 departures every day from Reagan National and 175 from La Guardia.

Selling the rights to airport gates would also have a small impact, analysts said. American has 69 gates at O’Hare and US Airways has three. The sale of two gates will not impair its ability to keep its current schedule.

The market value of the combined company has now reached $17 billion, up from $11 billion when the deal was announced in February, based on US Airways’ current share price.

William J. Baer, assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, defended the deal on Tuesday, telling reporters that it “opens up the marketplace as never before.” He said it would “disrupt today’s cozy arrangements” among the largest carriers, lower fares on crucial routes and provide consumers with more flight choices.

He said that in the past, even modest opportunities for low-cost carriers to gain more slots have made a difference for consumers. When Southwest Airlines acquired 36 slots at Newark Liberty International Airport as a condition of the United-Continental merger, it added six nonstop flights from Newark with connections to 60 other cities. Fares dropped by 10 percent on the nonstop routes and passenger traffic rose by 36 percent, he said.

He said that JetBlue’s lease from American of 16 slots a day at Reagan National had saved consumers $50 million a year on fares. At Reagan National, JetBlue and Southwest will be given a chance to buy the slots they lease from American.

But analysts disputed the idea that the Justice Department had extracted much from the airlines.

“This deal is simply to get Department of Justice off the hook from a lawsuit,” said Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant. “American Airlines and US Airways can easily reduce 44 daily departures,” He said the most likely losers would be places like Akron, Ohio; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Bangor, Me., because the airlines in line to get those slots do not have small planes to serve smaller communities.

Mr. Mann, the aviation consultant, added that Southwest’s fares had been rising and it was no longer the low-cost competitor it once was. “The really low-fare carriers now, Spirit and Allegiant, don’t have deals for these slots,” he said, referring to the gates at Reagan National and La Guardia.

The Obama administration has taken a tougher approach to antitrust than the Bush administration and challenged various proposed mergers. It blocked the AT&T takeover of T-Mobile and extracted the divestiture of beer brands before allowing the merger of Anheuser-Busch InBev with Grupo Modelo of Mexico.

In most of those cases, however, antitrust watchdogs have faulted the administration. “Some of the settlements ended up compromising to the point that I don’t think consumers were benefited,” Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, said.

In the airline merger, he said, all of the airlines involved will benefit, and consumers in some areas will be better off. But other consumers, in markets scattered around the country, will “have to pay more,” particularly on one-stop flights.

Michael J. de la Merced and Edward Wyatt contributed reporting.

11/12/2013

http://www.nytimes.com/

Justices Leave in Place Ruling Against Abortion Ultrasound Requirement
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: November 12, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a state court’s decision striking down an Oklahoma law that required women seeking abortions to have an ultrasound image placed in front of them and to listen to a detailed description of the fetus before the procedure.
National Twitter Logo.
Connect With Us on Twitter
Follow for breaking news and headlines.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
The ultrasound typically required a vaginal probe and had to be performed even if women objected. Some doctors said the requirement that they recite the description was a violation of medical ethics.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down the law in December, saying it conflicted with a 1992 United States Supreme Court decision protecting the constitutional right to abortion. In their brief to the justices, state officials said the law was consistent with the decision, which upheld a Pennsylvania law calling for informed consent from women seeking abortions.

In urging the court not to hear the case, Pruitt v. Nova Health Systems, No. 12-1170, operators of abortion clinics in Oklahoma said the law was “rare if not unique.”

“This is no garden-variety ‘informed consent’ law,” their brief said. “It does not merely make information available to a woman who wishes to terminate her pregnancy; it compels women to undergo an invasive medical examination and listen to a state-scripted narrative even if they object.”

As is their custom, the justices gave no reasons for their decision not to hear the case. Last week, the court dismissed an appeal from a decision striking down another Oklahoma law, that one an effort to limit medicinal abortions.

Find breaking news, multimedia, reviews & opinion on Washington, business, sports, movies, travel, books, jobs, education, real estate, cars & more.

11/12/2013

11/12/2013

URBAN WONK
The San Francisco Exodus
GABRIEL METCALF OCT 14, 2013
The San Francisco Exodus

My friends keep moving to Oakland. Gone from San Francisco for greener pastures and cheaper rents, because it’s just gotten too hard, by which I really mean too expensive. Their move signals that something has gone terribly wrong in this most progressive of American cities.

In some ways, we came by the problem innocently. San Francisco had the good fortune to be one of the very few 19th century industrial cities to successfully make the transition to a new, post-industrial economic base. It wasn’t just bohemians who set up shop here—all kinds of entrepreneurs and creative business people decided to call San Francisco home. As wave after wave of older industrial jobs moved out of town, new types of work were created to replace them.

At the same time, San Francisco was a great place to live. Partly from historical inheritance and partly from the work of activists who chose to make the city the focus of their activism, the city remained a walkable, urban paradise compared to most of America.

Something has gone terribly wrong in this most progressive of American cities.

A great quality of life and a lot of high-paying professional jobs meant that a lot of people wanted to live here. And they still do.

But the city did not allow its housing supply to keep up with demand. San Francisco was down-zoned (that is, the density of housing or permitted expansion of construction was reduced) to protect the "character" that people loved. It created the most byzantine planning process of any major city in the country. Many outspoken citizens did—and continue to do—everything possible to fight new high-density development or, as they saw it, protecting the city from undesirable change.

Unfortunately, it worked: the city was largely "protected" from change. But in so doing, we put out fire with gasoline. Over the past two decades, San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it's starting from a smaller overall population base). While Seattle decided to embrace infill development as a way to save open space at the edge of its region and put more people in neighborhoods where they could walk, San Francisco decided to push regional population growth somewhere else.

Whatever the merits of this strategy might be in terms of preserving the historic fabric of the city, it very clearly accelerated the rise in housing prices. As more people move to the Bay Area, the demand for housing continues to increase far faster than supply.

There’s a lot of housing under construction now, and for the next couple of years, we’ll see more built. But a few years of strong housing production, building out neighborhood plans that the city has worked on for the last two decades, is going to be too little, too late to undo the larger trend. Absent any transformative approaches, new housing construction is likely to return to its normally low levels after the current round of building is finished.


A barista prepares a coffee drink at Sightglass, an upscale coffee bar and roastery in San Francisco. (Robert Galbraith/Reuters)

Railing against Google buses, fancy restaurants or new condos—the visible signs of gentrification—will do nothing to stop San Francisco from becoming more expensive. These are not causes of the rising rents; they are symptoms. The root cause is that many people have chosen to live in San Francisco, and we are now all competing with one another to bid up the rents. As long as this remains a desirable place to live in a region that is producing a lot of jobs — while at the same time we fail to produce enough housing to accommodate the demand — then housing prices will continue to rise.

San Francisco needs more affordable housing. The problem is, subsidized, below-market-rate units are too expensive to build to help very many people. It costs around $250,000 in government subsidy per unit. You can get a sense of the scale of the cost based on how many people you want to help. Subsidizing affordable homes for 10,000 families comes at a price of tag of $2.5 billion. To subsidize affordable homes for 100,000 people would cost $25 billion.

So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can. But most people will never get to live in one of these units. It is not a strategy that will have an effect on the housing costs for the vast majority of the people trying to make a go of it in San Francisco. If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams, a place a parent can raise kids and not have to spend every minute at work—we have to fix the supply problem.

There is room for San Francisco to grow for many more decades. Our estimate is that if we could produce 5,000 units a year for a sustained period of time, that would be enough to make a real impact on affordability. This kind of infill development—if it is well-designed and well-located—would be good not just for housing costs, but also for moving us toward a society that drives less.

There may also be some more innovative approaches that are worth experimenting with, to try to create more housing specifically targeted to middle-income households. Perhaps we should pick one neighborhood with great transit where we say, all housing produced here has to be car-free. Perhaps we can get some more neighborhoods to allow micro-units and new secondary units (sometimes called "in-law" units) as "naturally affordable," un-subsidized types of housing. And maybe there are tweaks to the city’s "inclusionary housing" program that can generate more middle-income units.


Oakland City Center. (Lynn Watson/Shutterstock.com)

The rise in housing costs is having big effects on the broader region as well. We should be thinking about San Francisco in the context of the rest of the urbanized Bay Area as we look for ways to make life more affordable. As people get priced out of their first-choice neighborhoods, they move to new ones, and they in turn make it safe for subsequent waves of gentrifiers. This process has now moved from San Francisco to Oakland, and perhaps other parts of the Bay Area as well.

Whether the gentrification process is good or bad for neighborhoods, and for the lower-income people who live there, is something that can be debated endlessly. But what is strikingly different about the Bay Area in contrast to a place like New York is the fact that New York has so many more walkable, pre-war neighborhoods located on rail transit, within easy commuting distance of Manhattan. When New York neighborhoods like Soho and the Village got too expensive, for example, the Lower East Side became a major center for artists and other members of the cultural avant-garde. When the Lower East Side got too expensive, people went across the East River to Williamsburg. Next came Fort Green, Dumbo, Red Hook and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn that were still cheap. But as every spot in Brooklyn with a good rail connection to the city gets more expensive, there still is Queens, the Bronx, Newark, the towns up the Hudson — walkable neighborhoods in every direction.

As expensive as Manhattan is, and as far along into the gentrification process as the many surrounding communities are, there are still many places to go within the New York orbit to have an affordable, urban way of life.

We can’t solve affordable housing or transit access within the limits of any one city.

In the Bay Area, there are far fewer options that fit the criteria of walkable, transit-proximate and affordable. For many of my friends, there is just one: Oakland. This is what people mean when they say Oakland is the Brooklyn of the Bay Area. It’s the next stop on the train, it’s cool, it’s where young people go now.

If we were one city, San Francisco could spend some of its incredible wealth on the things Oakland needs, like hiring more cops and teachers, not to mention more transit connections between the two cities. This is not an argument for annexation but a call to think about the answers to our problems from a regional perspective. We can’t solve affordable housing or transit access within the limits of any one city.

Oakland is perched in a paradoxical and highly charged position right now, dealing with problems of serious poverty—not enough economic opportunity for its residents, not enough money to cover basic public services—while at the same time facing fears of rising rents and displacement if too many members of the San Francisco exodus move there. In the Oakland neighborhoods that are near BART or have good schools, or both, the housing prices are already climbing quickly.

San Francisco can’t do it alone, but it needs to do its part. The three big cities of the region (San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland) have disproportionately more opportunity and more responsibility to absorb a major percentage of the region’s population growth for the simple reason that they have the room and they have the existing transit infrastructure. But smaller cities should be asked to do their part, too. If San Jose succeeded in becoming more urban, and if smaller cities such as Palo Alto and Berkeley were willing to grow more, some of the pressure would be relieved from San Francisco. We need our own "metropolitan" strategy that ties the region together in better ways, and creates walkable, diverse communities in more locations.

11/11/2013

This is currently under construction!

11/11/2013

Justices Weigh Constitutionality of New York Town’s Prayers

http://www.nytimes.com/

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: November 6, 2013 281 Comments


WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, which begins its sessions with an invocation to God, considered on Wednesday whether a town in upstate New York had crossed a constitutional line in opening its Town Board meetings with mostly Christian prayers. The justices seemed to find the issue unusually difficult, with several of them suggesting there was no satisfactory principled answer.
Connect With NYTMetro
Metro Twitter Logo.
Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for news and conversation.
Enlarge This Image

James Lawler Duggan/Reuters
Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition prays outside the Supreme Court building.
Readers’ Comments
"A religious invocation at the beginning of any governmental meeting is a clear message to those 'non-believers' in attendance: you're not wanted here."
Jayne Carroll, Cave Creek, Ariz.
Read Full Comment »
Justice Elena Kagan, asking the first question, wanted to know whether the Supreme Court could open its sessions with an explicitly Christian prayer from a minister, one acknowledging, for instance, “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.” Such prayers were offered before Town Board meetings in Greece, N.Y., near Rochester.

Thomas G. Hungar, a lawyer for the town, said a 1983 Supreme Court decision allowed Christian prayers in legislative settings, though perhaps not in judicial ones. The decision, Marsh v. Chambers, upheld the Nebraska Legislature’s practice of opening its sessions with an invocation from a paid Presbyterian minister, saying such ceremonies were “deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country.”

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed frustrated with Mr. Hungar’s argument, which relied almost exclusively on the Marsh decision and the history it reflected. “The essence of the argument is that we’ve always done it this way, which has some force to it,” Justice Kennedy said. “But it seems to me that your argument begins and ends there.”

At the same time, Justice Kennedy appeared reluctant to have judges or other government officials decide what prayers are acceptable. Such a practice. he said, “involves the state very heavily in the censorship and the approval or disapproval of prayer.”

Justice Antonin Scalia said prayers in a legislative setting were different from the hypothetical ones in court that Justice Kagan had asked about. “People who have religious beliefs,” he said, “ought to be able to invoke the deity when they are acting as citizens and not as judges.”

Douglas Laycock, representing two women who challenged the prayers in New York as a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion, said there were important differences between the Nebraska case and the new one. The prayers in New York were often explicitly sectarian, he said, and town residents were forced to listen to them in order to participate in local government.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked Mr. Laycock for an example of a prayer that would be acceptable to people of all faiths.

Mr. Laycock said “prayers to the Almighty” and “prayers to the Creator” would be all right.

“What about devil worshipers?” Justice Scalia asked.

Mr. Laycock said that “if devil worshipers believe the devil is the almighty, they might be O.K.”

Justice Kagan said the wide-ranging discussion, which included questions about polytheism and atheism, missed the key point. “Isn’t the question mostly here in most communities,” she said, “whether the kind of language that I began with, which refers repeatedly to Jesus Christ, which is language that is accepted and admired and incredibly important to the majority members of a community, but is not accepted by a minority, whether that language will be allowed in a public town session like this one?”

But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., like several of the justices, seemed wary of the government distinguishing acceptable prayers from unacceptable ones. “Who was supposed to make these determinations?” he asked.

Mr. Laycock said town officials could simply tell those offering prayers to avoid discussing “points on which believers are known to disagree.”

Ian H. Gershengorn, a deputy solicitor general, argued on behalf of the federal government in support of the town, saying the prayers there were permitted by “our nation’s long history of opening legislative sessions not only with a prayer, but a prayer given in the prayer giver’s own religious idiom.”

That position seemed to trouble Justice Kagan. A resident attending a town meeting was, she said, “forced to identify whether she believes in the things that most of the people in the room believe in.”

Mr. Gershengorn acknowledged that “the strongest argument for the other side” was “that there is an element of coercion.”

The case, Town of Greece v. Galloway, No. 12-696, arose from the Town Board’s practice of starting its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month.” Town officials said that members of all faiths and atheists were welcome to give the opening prayer.

In practice, the federal appeals court in New York said in ruling against the town that almost all of the chaplains were Christian.

“A substantial majority of the prayers in the record contained uniquely Christian language,” Judge Guido Calabresi wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. “Roughly two-thirds contained references to ‘Jesus Christ,’ ‘Jesus,’ ‘Your Son’ or the ‘Holy Spirit.'”

“The town’s prayer practice must be viewed as an endorsement of a particular religious viewpoint,” Judge Calabresi wrote.

On Wednesday, Justice Stephen G. Breyer suggested ways in which the conflicting interests in the case might be accommodated, including with an effort to invite chaplains of many faiths. He said the House of Representatives, which starts its sessions with a prayer, told chaplains to bear in mind that the House was “comprised of members of many different faith traditions.”

Justice Kennedy suggested that the court might make such suggestions but in a nonbinding way. “Should we write that in a concurring opinion?” he asked.

Some justices worried that any ruling from the court could do more harm than good. “It’s hard,” Justice Kagan said, “because the court lays down these rules and everybody thinks that the court is being hostile to religion and people get unhappy and angry and agitated in various kinds of ways.”

Justice Scalia wondered where a ruling from the court would leave nonbelievers. “What is the equivalent of prayer for somebody who is not religious?” he asked Mr. Hungar, who had no answer.

But Justice Breyer suggested he might have one, though he did not give it. “Perhaps he’s asking me that question,” he said of his colleague, “and I can answer it later.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 7, 2013, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Supreme Court Hears Arguments on Constitutionality of Prayers at Town’s Meetings.