Scientology's legal record is genuinely divided across jurisdictions, and this record states that division plainly rather than flattening it: courts and governments in different countries have reached opposite conclusions about its legal and religious status. This entry gathers the record's separate strands and the movement's own responses.
Government inquiries opened early. Victoria's 1965 Anderson Board of Inquiry restricted Scientology practice under Australian state law, and the United Kingdom barred foreign Scientologists from entry from 1968 until 1980, after its own 1971 Foster Report found the exclusion wrong in principle. The pattern later reversed: Australia's High Court held Scientology a religion in 1983, and the UK Supreme Court's 2013 Hodkin decision let Scientology chapels register for marriage.
Court findings elsewhere cut the other way. A US district court condemned the E-meter as a misbranded device in 1971. French courts convicted Scientology corporate entities of organised fraud, made final in 2013. Germany's Federal Labour Court found in 1995 that the Hamburg organisation served commercial rather than religious ends, and German intelligence observed it from the 1990s until a 15 May 2026 announcement ended its standalone nationwide listing.
The clearest documented response is the 1993 tax settlement: after a dispute running since a 1967 revocation, the Internal Revenue Service granted tax exemption on terms including a 12.5 million dollar payment and withdrawal of litigation against the agency, on reasoning it never published. Litigation against critics and journalists, including the Behar and the Fishman and Geertz cases, is the movement's other documented pattern of response.