Political theorists writing about the ‘rule-and-exemption’ approach to the accommodation of minority religious practices tend to focus on exemptions that are exercised by individuals. However, some are exercised by institutions, such as exemptions that allow organisations to discriminate in matters of employment in ways that would otherwise be unlawful, exemptions that allow schools to opt-out of otherwise statutory requirements, and exemptions that allow hospitals to refuse to provide particular treatments and services. This paper argues that at least some of these institutional exemptions might qualify as examples of ‘joint governance’, in the sense that Ayelet Shachar (2001) has used the term. It then goes on to discuss what alterations to current institutional exemptions would be required to satisfy Shachar’s favoured model of joint governance: ‘transformative accommodation’.
