Sam Foer ‘27L Wins Law School Essay Contest Foer won the top prize for an essay competition sponsored by the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

By Law Communications
March 17, 2026

Sam Foer, a member of the Law Class of 2027, won first place in the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s Law School Essay Contest. For their submissions, students were asked to respond to the 2025 Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which the Court sided with religious parents who objected on religious grounds to public school instruction that included books with LGBTQ+ themes or characters. Foer took home a top prize of $4,000 for his scholarship submission.

Foer’s essay, titled “From Coercion to Exposure: Parental Rights and the Collapse of a Constitutional Boundary,” examines how the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the case alters the constitutional framework governing parental rights in public education.

“My central argument is that the Court blurred an important First Amendment distinction between coercion and exposure,” said Foer. “Earlier precedents such as Wisconsin v. Yoder addressed situations where the state effectively compelled participation in an environment that threatened to reshape a community’s way of life. In contrast, Mahmoud treats mere exposure to ideas in a pluralistic curriculum as a constitutional burden, which risks transforming a narrow protection against state domination into a broader parental veto over educational content.”

Foer argues that this shift has broader implications for how we understand parental authority, children’s developing cognitive autonomy, and the civic role of public education. Protecting freedom of conscience is essential, he said, but constitutionalizing objections to exposure may ultimately undermine both educational institutions and the shared civic framework they are meant to support.

“More broadly, the essay reflects the research agenda I’ve been developing in my larger scholarship on the relationship between constitutional rights and the mental conditions that make constitutional agency possible,” said Foer. “My work argues that across multiple core rights clauses, constitutional doctrine implicitly protects capacities such as belief, judgment, meaning-making, and mental privacy because they are the conditions that allow individuals to function as rights-bearing constitutional subjects. The essay approaches the parental rights debate from that perspective. It asks whether constitutional doctrine should treat exposure to ideas as a violation of liberty, or whether liberty is better understood as protecting the individual’s ability to form beliefs without coercion while still encountering the pluralism inherent in democratic life.”

Foer said he decided to enter the contest in part because it offered an opportunity to introduce that broader framework into ongoing debates about religious liberty and public education.

“One of my ambitions as a scholar is to contribute to the legal and constitutional theory discourse by clarifying the cognitive and moral conditions that make constitutional rights intelligible in the first place,” he said. “The controversy surrounding Mahmoud provided a concrete doctrinal setting where those questions are already emerging, particularly around the distinction between coercion of conscience and exposure to ideas.”

Foer’s article will be published online later this month, followed by a print edition.

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