This weekend at St. John’s Law, the Mattone Center will host a regional conference of the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ICLARS), “Education, Religious Freedom, and State Neutrality.” The conference will gather scholars and judges from Europe and the United States. Papers from the conference will appear eventually here on the blog. From the start, the Mattone Center has had a special interest in comparative law and religion, and we’re delighted to continue the tradition in this way
I’ve attached an abbreviated conference program below.
Last night, the Mattone Center Reading Group met to discuss natural law in C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity.” Great turnout for an important topic. Thanks to all the St. John’s Law students who participated!
I’m delighted to announce that St. John’s will host the annual International Moot Court Competition in Law & Religion at our Rome campus in March 2026. This is a wonderful opportunity for law students, which brings together teams from the US and Europe to argue a case before panels representing the US Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. I have participated for many years, as both a coach and a judge, and have always found it a very worthwhile and fun experience.
Details about this year’s case and the competition rules can be found at this link. Check it out. And see you in Rome next year!
Each year, the Denise ’90 and Michael ’91 Mattone Center for Law and Religion selects student fellows who contribute to the Center’s mission of providing an unrivaled forum for exploring law and religion from domestic, international, and comparative perspectives.
This year’s fellows are Vincent D’Avanzo ’27, Anastasia Kaliabakos ‘27, Isabel Lane ’27, and returning fellow Kalina Mesrobian ’26. They look forward to playing an active role in the Center’s offerings. Among other responsibilities, they will contribute to the Center’s blog, the Law and Religion Forum, where their weekly “Around the Web” posts will cover timely church-and-state issues. They will also edit episodes of the Legal Spirits podcast and manage the Center’s social media presence.
The Mattone Center has posted a new video on our YouTube channel about Everson v. Board of Education (1947), one of the Supreme Court’s landmark Establishment Clause cases. In Everson, the Court upheld a New Jersey program that reimbursed parents for transportation costs to parochial as well as public schools. Justice Black’s majority opinion famously explores several arguments about the meaning of the Establishment Clause and has influenced the Court’s jurisprudence ever since.
In our new video, we explain the facts of the case, the Court’s reasoning, and why Everson remains such a touchstone in the law of church and state.
We hope you’ll take a look—and please consider subscribing to the Center’s channel for more explainers on law-and-religion cases and issues.
Earlier this month, Armenia and Azerbaijan initialed a draft peace agreement at the White House. The agreement, brokered by the Trump administration, has not yet been signed or ratified, but its key terms are now public—and deeply controversial.
Under the deal, Armenia formally renounces its claims to Nagorno-Karabakh and grants the United States a 99-year lease on a new transit corridor through its southern border, part of what the administration is calling the TRIPP initiative. In return, Azerbaijan pledges to recognize Armenia’s current borders and allow reciprocal, unimpeded transit.
For Armenia, the concessions are painful—particularly after the ethnic cleansing of Karabakh’s Armenian population in 2023. But the deal may offer short-term stability and give Armenia time to rebuild. Christian advocacy groups in the U.S., long concerned about religious prisoners and displaced Christian communities in the region, played a notable role in urging American involvement. President Trump’s public reference to “Christian” detainees was no accident.
In a new piece for First Things, I explore what this draft agreement means for the region, why the U.S. chose to intervene now, and whether the engagement we’re seeing today signals a deeper and more lasting American commitment—or simply a pause before the next crisis.
Delighted to be interviewed in today’s National Catholic Reporter on the Washington State law that requires priests to report information about child abuse that they receive during the sacrament of confession. Here’s a snippet:
At the heart of this legal case is a conflict between the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, which guarantees religious freedom, and the state’s compelling interest to prosecute child sex abuse, said Mark Movsesian, director of the Mattone Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s School of Law in New York. He said that if a law selects religion for “disfavored treatment,” the state must prove why the law is necessary and that it is as unrestrictive as possible. Movsesian also said that the Washington law targets clergy-penitent privilege within the sacrament of confession, but does not lift attorney-client privilege in the reporting of abuse cases.
“I think it’s going to be hard for Washington to say: ‘We have a compelling interest in having priests reveal what they learned in confession, but we don’t have a compelling interest in making lawyers reveal what they hear in their client’s confidence,'” Movsesian said.
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:
