Clay v. United States

Audience

Although the Clay v. United States litigation was watched closely by Ali supporters, antiwar protesters, and other interest groups, it is unlikely that the opinion handed down by the Court had much of an intended audience outside legal circles. The decision hinged on a technicality that cleared Ali’s record but left intact the government’s view of selective conscientious objector claims stated two months earlier in Gillette. Similarly, it is hard to imagine that Justice Harlan’s one-paragraph concurrence—one of the last opinions of his distinguished judicial career—was itself intended to be widely read.

Justice Douglas’s concurrence, however, devotes a significant amount of attention to the distinction between “just” and “unjust” wars under Islamic doctrine. Given the racial and religious fervor that had, at times, marked the dispute over Ali’s conduct, Douglas’s opinion may well have represented an attempt on the part of the Court’s most liberal member to educate the public—to identify important similarities between Catholicism (one of the religions at issue in Gillette) and Islam, at least insofar as selective conscientious objection was concerned.