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Faith In Elections, Derek T. Muller

Journal Articles

Americans may be suffering a crisis of faith. But not necessarily a crisis of religious faith. Instead, it is a crisis of faith in elections.

This language of faith in elections—do we have faith, are we losing faith, can we restore faith—pervades our political discourse and suggests religious imagery. Examples only scratch the surface of the language of faith in elections, democracy, and the American ideal. The language is seemingly everywhere. Words, of course, take on different meanings in different contexts. But the choice to use the word faith does appear to deliberately invoke religious imagery. Words like trust, confidence, …

The Professor As Institutional Entrepreneur, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Law professors are all about ideas, and the creation of an institute, clinic, or center within a law school is the instantiation of an idea. Ideas embodied in law school institutions become crystallized in the fabric of a school, changing its culture, internalizing its values, and reflecting its priorities. Robert Cochran has helped to establish multiple institutes, centers, and clinics at Pepperdine Caruso Law School, and in so doing he has become the law school's great serial entrepreneur. The institutes Cochran helped to establish have become laboratories to give expression to his ideas about the relationship between faith, ethics, and …

Faith Tends To Subvert Legal Order, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Two old friends and colleagues died in the spring of 1997. Both share with me a Baptist boyhood and a Roman Catholic middle age. Both showed me that the relevance of religion to a lawyer's work is best approached with believers' irony.

Frank Booker, descendant of Cherokee Indians, Missouri farmers, railroaders, and Baptist ministers, taught law at Stetson and then Notre Dame, with a style all his own and with a steady eye on how important the law is. After his funeral, one of his students remembered for me a day in Frank's first-year torts class. They were several weeks …

Levinson Builds The Kingdom: Comment On "Professing Law", Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This Article takes the perspective that the professed law is an idol. As such, it is false worship, which is led by false priests, and is rationalized by false prophets. Professor Shaffer proposes that those who believe in the will of God are presented with two tasks. First, one must tear down this idol, and secondly, one must then build the Kingdom. He focuses his discussion on how one can build the Kingdom, and examines the viability of a Kingdom built upon constitutionalism, citizenship, and community.