Law Commons^™

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

This book brings together two previously separate aspects of Michael J. Perry’s thoughtful and pioneering scholarship dealing with the proper relation of morality (especially religious morality) to law and human rights and the role of courts in protecting human rights.

Judicial Enforcement Of The Establishment Clause, Richard W. Garnett

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This paper is the author’s contribution to a roundtable conference, held in October of 2008 at Notre Dame Law School, devoted to Prof. Kent Greenawalt’s book, Religion and the Constitution: Establishment and Fairness. It is suggested that Greenawalt’s admirably context-sensitive approach to church-and-state questions might lead us to think that the best course for judges is to find (somehow) some bright-line, on-off “rules” and “tests”, constructed to identify and forbid the most obvious violations of the Religion Clause’s core (whatever that is), and to give up on -- or, perhaps, “underenforce” -- the rest.

Free To Believe, Richard Garnett

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Richard Garnett reviews Religious Freedom and the Constitution by Christopher L. Eisgruber & Lawrence G. Sager, Harvard University Press, 352 pages, $28.95

Drop Coffers, Richard W. Garnett, Benjamin P. Carr

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”Coffers.” When we hear or read the word, what do we picture? Buried treasure on the Isle of Monte Cristo? The dragon Smaug’s stolen riches, piled deep under the Lonely Mountain? Maybe we dimly remember a line of Shakespeare or Chaucer. If one is male and of a certain age, the word might bring to the surface suppressed memories of the all-nighters and arcana associated with Dungeons & Dragons. And, if one is a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, one’s thoughts might turn to the checking account of St. Jerome Catholic School in Cleveland.

Erastian And High Church Approaches To The Law: The Jurisprudential Categories Of Robert E. Rodes, Jr., M. Cathleen Kaveny

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It is a great honor for me to have been asked to contribute to this issue of the Journal of Law and Religion focusing on the work of my colleague and friend, Robert E. Rodes, Jr. In June 2006, Professor Rodes celebrated his fiftieth anniversary as a member of the faculty of Notre Dame Law School. His long career has marked him as a founding father of interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of faith, law, and morality—the very sort of scholarship which this journal is dedicated to fostering and preserving.

The topics that Professor Rodes has considered over the years …

Pilgrim Law: Overcoming False Consciousness Through The Witness Of London's Economic Migrants, Vincent D. Rougeau

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The article discusses the author's view on the works and beliefs of Robert E. Rodes Jr. He considered faith and professional life as the powerful link on Rodes works and cited three points of reflection on the matter which includes on Rodes' concept of "Pilgrim Law" that has been influential on the author's works, thinking about the relationship between the professional roles of a lawyer and a call to a lived Christian faith. He believed that the Rodes' book "Pilgrim Law" took a formidable task on extending the principles of the theology of liberation to American jurisprudence and became an …

Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran

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This Article focuses on Habermas’s sophisticated awareness of the tension between secularization of law and legal indeterminacy and treats his discourse theory of law as a significant test of the feasibility of reconciling these claims. In an earlier article, I criticized Habermas’s discourse of justification and his claim that it legitimated the law independently of a religious or metaphysical worldview. Even assuming I was misguided in that critique, this Article argues that Habermas’s discourse of application is incoherent and fails to maintain the secularization of the law in the face of legal indeterminacy. Given Habermas’s failure, contemporary legal theory needs …

Beyond Theocracy And Secularism (Part I): Toward A New Paradigm For Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran

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As part of a larger project challenging and moving beyond the premodern and modern paradigms, this article focuses on the modern paradigm and its notion of secularization. Section II will discuss the origin of the modern paradigm as a reaction to the religious pluralism and the religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth century such as the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618-48) and the English Civil War (1642-51) resulting from the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation divided the Western part of the Christian tradition into separate confessional institutions based on different theological interpretations of Christianity such as Lutheran, Calvinist, and …

Symposium Introduction, Mark C. Modak-Truran

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The articles and essays in this Symposium should greatly aid disclosing key presuppositions of religionists and secularists by thinking about the law (rather than through the law) and by employing other disciplinary perspectives and methods to provide a more sophisticated understanding of law and religion. I will provide a brief summary of each article and essay and indicate the methods or disciplinary perspectives employed by them in their analysis.

Religion And Group Rights: Are Churches (Just) Like The Boy Scouts?, Richard W. Garnett

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What role do religious communities, groups, and associations play - and, what role should they play - in our thinking and conversations about religious freedom and church-state relations? These and related questions - that is, questions about the rights and responsibilities of religious institutions - are timely, difficult, and important. And yet, they are often neglected.

It is not new to observe that American judicial decisions and public conversations about religious freedom tend to focus on matters of individuals' rights, beliefs, consciences, and practices. The special place, role, and freedoms of groups, associations, and institutions are often overlooked. However, if …

Pluralism, Dialogue, And Freedom: Professor Robert Rodes And The Church-State Nexus, Richard W. Garnett

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The idea of church-state separation and the image of a wall are at the heart of nearly every citizen's and commentator's thinking about law and religion, and about faith and public life. Unfortunately, the inapt image often causes great confusion about the important idea. What should be regarded as an important feature of religious freedom under constitutionally limited government too often serves simply as a slogan, and is too often employed as a rallying cry, not for the distinctiveness and independence of religious institutions, but for the marginalization and privatization of religious faith.

How, then, should we understand church-state separation? …

Church, State, And The Practice Of Love, Richard W. Garnett

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In his first encyclical letter, Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict XVI describes the Church as a community of love. In this letter, he explores the organized practice love by and through the Church, and the relationship between this practice, on the one hand, and the Church's commitment to the just ordering of the State and society, on the other. God is love, he writes. This paper considers the implications of this fact for the inescapably complicated nexus of church-state relations in our constitutional order.

The specific goal for this paper is to draw from Deus caritas est some insight into …

Introduction: Religion, Division, And The Constitution, Richard W. Garnett

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Thirty-five years ago, in his landmark Lemon v. Kurtzman opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger declared that state actions could "excessive[ly]"—and, therefore, unconstitutionally—"entangle" government and religion, not only by requiring or allowing intrusive monitoring by officials of religious institutions and activities, but also through their "divisive political potential." He worried that government actions burdened with this "potential" pose a "threat to the normal political process and "divert attention from the myriad issues and problems that confront every level of government." And, he insisted that "political division along religious lines was one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was …

The Democratic Virtues, Our Common Life And The Common School: Trust In Democracy: Anabaptists, Italian Americans, And Solidarity, Thomas L. Shaffer

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Consider two phrases in Professor Marie Failinger's charge to those of us discussing Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition, October 28, 2005, at Hamline University: (i) "How would we construct a real democratic sociality holding each other responsible for ethical life that would warrant trust in democracy? . . . and, (ii) How do the religious traditions help us reflect on this issue?"

My reflection, probably sectarian, refers more to where we come from than to what we choose. The reference here is to three communities, none of which is primarily concerned with "real democratic sociality." But none of them is …

Religion And State: Some Main Issues And Sources, John M. Finnis

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Public reason's default position is not atheism or agnosticism about the dependence of everything on a transcendent Creator. On the contrary, there is good reason to judge that there is such a transcendent cause, capable of communicating with intelligent creatures, that one of the world's religions may be essentially true and others substantially truer than atheism, and that there is a human or natural right to immunity from coercion in religious inquiry, belief (or unbelief, precisely as such), and practice so far as is compatible with public order, that is with the rights of others, public peace and public morality. …

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

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In volume 1, James Hitchcock provides a comprehensive historical treatment of all the U.S. Supreme Court cases involving the religion clauses. Volume 2 focuses on the broader “context of the continuing dialogue about the role of religion in public life” and its relationship to the Court’s interpretation of the religion clauses.

Changing Minds: Proselytism, Freedom, And The First Amendment, Richard W. Garnett

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Proselytism is, as Paul Griffiths has observed, a topic enjoying renewed attention in recent years. What's more, the practice, aims, and effects of proselytism are increasingly framed not merely in terms of piety and zeal; they are seen as matters of geopolitical, cultural, and national-security significance as well. Indeed, it is fair to say that one of today's more pressing challenges is the conceptual and practical tangle of religious liberty, free expression, cultural integrity, and political stability. This essay is an effort to unravel that tangle by drawing on the religious-freedom-related work and teaching of the late Pope John Paul …

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

RELIGION ON TRIAL makes the historical debates about the religion clauses accessible to a broad audience. In addition, it properly links issues of free exercise of religion to issues about fundamental rights in a manner that is usually missed by legal scholars and political scientists. Consequently, this book would be a good addition to undergraduate, graduate, and law school courses on the religion clauses or on law and religion.

The Case Of The Missing Discipline: Finding Buddhist Legal Studies, Rebecca Redwood French

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No abstract provided.

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

Lucinda Peach addresses the issue of religious lawmaking by focusing on the constitutional implications and gender issues that she argues have been overlooked by the Supreme Court and by participants in the debate about religion in politics.

Reenchanting The Law: The Religious Dimension Of Judicial Decision Making, Mark C. Modak-Truran

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Without a religious justification in the law, judges cannot fully justify their decisions in hard cases from within the law. The law must be indeterminate because the Establishment Clause proscribes this full justification. This does not mean that the Establishment Clause prohibits judges from fully justifying their decisions during their deliberations about hard cases. It only prohibits judges from including that full justification in their written opinions. Deliberation and explanation are separate stages of judicial decision making that should be kept distinct. Given this distinction, my thesis is that judges should fully justify their decisions in hard cases by relying …

Assimilation, Toleration, And The State's Interest In The Development Of Religious Doctrine, Richard Garnett

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Thirty-five years ago, in the context of a church-property dispute, Justice William Brennan observed that government interpretation of religious doctrine and judicial intervention in religious disputes are undesirable, because when civil courts undertake to resolve [doctrinal] controversies..., the hazards are ever present of inhibiting the free development of religious doctrine and of implicating secular interests in matters of purely ecclesiastical concern. This statement, at first, seems wise and fittingly cautious, even unremarkable and obvious. On examination, though, it turns out to be intriguing, elusive, and misleading. Indeed, Justice Brennan's warning presents hazards of its own, and its premises - if …

The Theology Of The Blaine Amendments, Richard W. Garnett

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The Supreme Court affirmed, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, that the Constitution permits us to experiment with school-choice programs and, in particular, with programs that include religious schools. However, the constitutions of nearly forty States contain provisions - generically called Blaine Amendments - that speak more directly and, in many cases, more restrictively, than does the First Amendment to the flow of once-public funds to religious schools. This Article is a series of reflections, prompted by the Blaine Amendments, on education, citizenship, political liberalism, and religious freedom.

First, the Article considers what might be called the federalism defense of the provisions. …

Reforming Child Protection In Response To The Catholic Church Child Sexual Abuse Scandal, Susan Vivian Mangold

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No abstract provided.

Lawyers And Biblical Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer

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This is part of a broader exploration of the suggestion that the biblical prophets-Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Nathan, and the others-are sources of ethical reflection and moral example for modern American lawyers. The suggestion appears to be unusual; I am not sure why.

The Prophets were, more than anything else, lawyers-as their successors, the Rabbis of the Talmud, were. They were neither teachers nor bureaucrats, not elected officials or priests or preachers. And the comparison is not an ancient curiosity:

Much of what admirable lawyer-heroes have done in modern America has been prophetic in the biblical sense-that is, what they …

Canon Law And The Human Person, John J. Coughlin

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This article explores the unity of law and theology in the 1983 Code of Canon Law. The unity has remained critical since canon law emerged in the ancient Church. From the origins of the primitive Christian communities through the patristic era, the Church manifested a tension between charism and office, spirit and law? The medieval canonists achieved a great synthesis of the reason of law and faith of theology. The unified theory helped to form the basis of the Western legal tradition. The Reformation focus on sola fide (faith alone) tended to sever the unity. With the Enlightenment, reason was …

Shopping For Religion: The Change In Everyday Religious Practice And Its Importance To The Law, Rebecca Redwood French

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No abstract provided.

Symposium Introduction: Law, Religion, And Human Rights In Global Perspective, Mark C. Modak-Truran

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The essays and articles in this Symposium highlight the importance of religion for properly understanding the nature of law, feminism, globalization, human rights, international legal history, and judicial decision making. These essays and articles also challenge the academy to accept a more sophisticated understanding of religion and to understand its importance for all academic inquiry.

Reenchanting International Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran

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I will argue that international law needs religion because it is indeterminate and that international law should not attempt to resolve legal indeterminancy because this would require establishing an official international religion. Given the limitations of this article, however, I will not attempt to provide a comprehensive normative and descriptive account of law and international law to support this claim." My more modest expectations are to provide a normative theory of law to justify the interpretation of international law in cases in which international law is indeterminate.

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

Eric Michael Mazur’s dissertation (supervised by Phillip E. Hammond) argues that minority religious communities have had to “subordinate their distinct theological beliefs to the transcending principles of the majority articulated by the constitutional order, or they are forced to do so by the physical powers of the government” (p. xxv). To support this argument, he takes an empirical approach and focuses on the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), and Native American religious traditions.