In this episode of Legal Spirits, we examine a new Washington State law that eliminates the clergy-penitent privilege in child abuse reporting. The law requires clergy to report suspected abuse, even if they learn about it through Confession and other confidential spiritual communications—raising serious questions under the Free Exercise Clause. Host Mark Movsesian and guest Marc DeGirolami discuss the legal framework, historical background, and broader implications for religious liberty. Listen in!
Exciting news! I can announce today that Mattone Center alum Dan Vitagliano will clerk for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States in October Term 2027. Dan, who graduated from St. John’s Law summa cum laude in 2020, was a student fellow in the Mattone Center for two years, 2018-2019 and 2019-2020, and is the first graduate of St. John’s ever to be selected for a Supreme Court clerkship.
Following graduation, Dan clerked for Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil ’83 of the Southern District of New York and Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit, and worked as a Constitutional Law Fellow at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he litigated constitutional cases involving religious liberty and free speech in federal and state courts. He is currently an associate at Consovoy McCarthy in DC.
I’ll have more about Dan in a future post, but for now I just want to say how happy and proud all of us at the Mattone Center are for him. I’m sure my former colleague and co-director of the Center, Marc DeGirolami, joins us. Congratulations, Dan!
At the Volokh site yesterday, I have a post remembering my former boss, Justice David Souter, who passed away last week at the age of 85. He was a remarkable person and a true gentleman, always kind and generous to his clerks, even when we messed up:
One memory from that year stands out for me especially. As a clerk, one of my responsibilities was proofreading final drafts of opinions. It was a routine thing, but on one such occasion, when Justice Souter was writing the opinion for the Court, I accidentally inserted the word “not” into a sentence, reversing its meaning. By the time I discovered my mistake, Justice Souter was already on the bench announcing the ruling, and the clerk’s office had already released the opinion to the press. There was no way to fix it.
I was mortified. I had messed up a Supreme Court opinion, and in my head, I was already becoming a cautionary tale: “Remember the law clerk who did that?” My co-clerks commiserated with me and agreed that the only thing to do was wait for the Justice to return to chambers and tell him what had happened. It was a long couple of hours. I walked around the block a few times and then, when the Court broke for lunch, knocked on the boss’s door. I half expected to be fired.
When I told him what I had done, he shook his head and chuckled. He said to let the clerk’s office know so they could issue a corrected opinion. “Listen,” he said, and he told me the perhaps apocryphal story of the young New York lawyer who had cost his client millions of dollars by accidentally including too many zeros in a bond debenture. “That’s the sort of mistake you worry about, not this,” he consoled. “Just take care of it.” Greatly relieved, I followed his advice, and the clerk’s office quietly issued a revised opinion. As far as I know, no one on the outside has ever been the wiser—until now, that is.
I will cherish the memory of my time working for him. May he rest in peace.
The summer conference season is underway! I’m looking forward to participating later this month (online) in a very interesting conference organized by Professor Adelaide Madera at the University deli Studio di Messina, “Religious Freedom of Minority Groups in Times of Ongoing Crisis.” I’ll be speaking on one of the largest “religious” groups in the US, the Nones. Details about the conference are at the announcement below:
This is a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I did want to note that next month Notre Dame Press will release an English translation of French scholar Pierre Manent’s recent book,Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Many observers have noted an uptick in Christianity in France (and the US), especially among young men. How much of this is a genuine spiritual movement and how much a cultural “Team Christianity” isn’t yet clear, and of course some would deny there is a difference between the two, anyway. Whatever explains the uptick, it’s hard to imagine a French Christianity without Pascal–which makes the Manent book important reading for this moment. The publisher’s description follows:
Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifferenceis the first English translation of Pierre Manent’s penetrating engagement with the seventeenth century polymath and apologist for the Christian faith, Blaise Pascal.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was the first Christian apologist to address modern human beings on their own terms and present a defense of the Christian religion that still resonates today. A major publishing and intellectual event in France when it first appeared in 2022, Challenging Modern Atheism and IndifferenceisPierre Manent’s investigation of Pascal’s exploration of Christianity in the wake of a sharp atheistic turn at the dawn of the modern state and modern science. Comprehensive in scope and profound in treatment, this engagement with all of Pascal’s writings, including his famous Pensées, appeals to the reader’s head and heart. Manent emphasizes the joy that comes from engaging the truth of faith, and he argues that we are diminished by forgetting the unique and distinctive contributions of Christianity.
More than brilliant exegesis, Manent enlists Pascal in a much greater endeavor: to make what he calls “the Christian proposition” concerning God and man intelligible to Europeans who have made it their business to ignore the religion that founded Europe and the larger Western world.
Princeton’s Robert George is one of the world’s leading scholars of natural law. This is not a subject that keeps one out of controversy nowadays, but George has a unique ability to engage the public debate thoughtfully from a conservative perspective while retaining the respect of interlocutors on the other side. This summer, Encounter Books will release a new collection of essays from him on current issues, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. Definitely worth reading. Here is the publisher’s description:
InSeeking Truth and Speaking Truthacclaimed political philosopher and legal scholar Robert P. George tackles some of the most vexing issues dividing Americans today. He argues that the “Age of Faith” of the Medieval period and the “Age of Reason” of the European Enlightenments have been followed by a modern “Age of Feeling,” in which people derive their beliefs not from faith or reason — or faith and reason — but from emotion, which becomes the central source of truth. And so, many have embraced a fierce moral absolutism on the basis of beliefs that are the products of nothing more than subjective inclinations and experiences.
This collection of essays challenges the “Age of Feeling” by appealing to reason in the pursuit of sound moral understanding on crucial and contentious topics including human dignity, the definition of marriage, philosophy of law, constitutional law, the nature of civil liberties, free markets, and others.
Robert George has taught generations of students at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and he has long proclaimed that a teacher’s sacred mission is to form his students to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. In Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth he shows us how.
