In Awad v. Ziriax (No. 10-6273) the Tenth Circuit upheld a district court order preliminarily enjoining the Oklahoma State Election Board from certifying a proposed constitutional amendment that would bar Oklahoma state courts from considering or using “Sharia law,” the law of other States that included Sharia law, or “international law.”
The court upheld the injunction based on the Establishment Clause. It determined that the plaintiff had standing to challenge the amendment as he suffered from “a constitutional directive of exclusion and disfavored treatment of a particular religious legal tradition.” It also determined that the plaintiff had a strong likelihood of success on the merits as the Oklahoma law clearly discriminated among religions, targeting only “Sharia” law. Finally, the court found an absence of a compelling State interest as the State did not “identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve” and “did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma.”
