the edge of the First Ammendment

Recently heard on the news of a muslim woman who was granted a new trial in small-claims court after her previous case was dismissed because she wore a scarf and veil in court, only revealing her eyes.

I'm all for religious freedoms. More specifically, I'm more for freedom FROM religion, but that's another post. However if a person can't be identified as a matter of course of their religious beliefs, how can the state/court provide justice for the offenses against them? The state/court needs to know WHOM it's serving. There are some technical issues to this argument which I'll overlook for the moment (she could be identified by fingerprints I'd assume, if that's not a modesty issue). There's the potential solution that the case be tried by a female judge, but that would prevent men from being in attendance in the court, which would put court operations in secret, violating the rights of more people in the public by inducing gender discrimination... right?

Of course, now I'm really curious about other photo-ID based issues surrounding muslim women that wear the niqab or burqa... Can one get a driver's license? What's the point of photo ID when your face is covered? And even if driving is not an issue because the woman is not allowed to drive (due to familial or religious restrictions), what about writing a check? Or getting on a plane or train? (I'm of course ignoring some other important issues here in that the woman in the news was in court contesting damages to a rental car - how did she rent the car without showing her face?)

There's lots of issues here with women's rights in what may (or may not) be perceived as oppressive religious lifestyles. Those issues may (or may not) be relieved by the women, in their religious beliefs, giving up control of their lives by their own consent (which brings up even more issues about whether a sound-body-and-mind adult citizen can legally reliquish consent i.e. the Spanner case).

I suspect you can't actually buy TPE on ebay, but it's kind of funny that it was a sponsored link when searching for a link to the UK court case.

But really what I mean to throw out there is: We live in a world where photos of people's faces are the de-facto standard for identification and person-to-person authentication. Can an individual expect all of the rights and privileges afforded others while not revealing their face? Must an alternate means of identification become available and pervasive, like ADA provisions, to serve citizens with specific religious beliefs?

I'm kind of curious about both Muslim religious leaders as well as what the courts have to say, I'm sure that this has come up before...