The Center for Law and Religion invites you to join us for a conversation with United States District Judge Richard J. Sullivan (left) about current and potential issues before the U.S. Supreme Court involving religious freedom. Topics will include the ongoing contraception mandate litigation, conflicts between the rights of same-sex couples and rights of religious conscience, and the future of religious freedom in the United States. Light refreshments will be provided.
The event will take place on Tuesday, October 27, 2015, from 6-8 p.m., at the offices of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, 425 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017. It will be hosted by Mary Kay Vyskocil, St. John’s Law Class of ’83. The event is free, but space is limited and advance registration is required. To attend, please RSVP to Jean Nolan at 718-990-8059 or nolanj@stjohns.edu by October 21, 2015.
The Fondazione Marcianum, a research center in Venice, will hold its second annual international law-and-religion moot court competition this coming March. The competition, which gathers law students from universities around the world, is the only one of its kind: a truly international competition in which students argue a case before panels simulating both the US Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. Full disclosure: I took part as a judge in last year’s competition and found it extremely worthwhile. This year, I’ve helped craft the problem and will deliver one of the keynote addresses.
This year’s problem relates to the establishment of religion — to school prayer, specifically. You can download the problem here. I greatly encourage law students to consider competing. It’s a truly unique educational experience. Any questions, please contact the Fondazione here.
TheCenter for Law and Religionat St. John’s Law School is pleased to announce its third biennial Colloquium in Law and Religion, scheduled for Spring 2016. This seminar invites leading law and religion scholars to make presentations to a small audience of students and faculty.
The following speakers have confirmed:
February 1: Brett G. Scharffs (Brigham Young University School of Law)
February 16: Robin Fretwell Wilson (University of Illinois School of Law)
February 29: Robert P. George (Princeton University)
March 14: Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School)
April 4: Justice Samuel A. Alito (United States Supreme Court)
April 18: Elizabeth H. Prodromou (Boston University & Tufts University Fletcher School of Diplomacy)
Topics will be announced at a future date.
For more information or if you would like to attend the sessions, please contact the colloquium’s organizers, Marc DeGirolami (degirolm@stjohns.edu) and Mark Movsesian (movsesim@stjohns.edu). For information about past colloquia, please click here, Spring 2012, and here, Spring 2014 (hosted with Villanova Law School).
This has been another exciting and productive year for the Center for Law and Religion. We co-hosted a conference in Rome on international religious freedom that opened with an address by Pope Francis, as well as events in Manhattan and Queens on the persecution of Mideast Christians. We continued to host our award-winning blog, the Center for Law and Religion Forum, which you are now reading. And Center faculty published articles and book chapters, and participated in numerous academic conferences and panels.
Our annual report for 2013-2014 is available here. Please take a look. Thanks to our friends for their continuing support, and please let us know if you have any suggestions for future activities.
Professors DeGirolami, Annicchino and Movsesian with Seminar Students
We were delighted to have our old friend, Dr. Pasquale Annicchino of the European University Institute in Florence, visit with us yesterday. Pasquale gave a presentation in Mark’s Comparative Law & Religion seminar about his brand new book, Esportare La Libertà Religiosa: Il Modello Americano Nell’arena Globale [“Exporting Religious Freedom: The American Model in the Global Arena”] (Il Mulino). (For those that may not know, il Mulino is Italy’s most prestigious publisher). The book’s primary concern is about the influence of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 on international conceptions of religious liberty, and the different sorts of ideological and related resistance that the American model has encountered. The book has been discussed and reviewed in Il Corriere della Sera, Il Foglio, and The Economist.
Here’s the description of the book:
Con l’adozione nel 1998 dell’lnternational Religious Freedom Act gli Stati Uniti hanno posto al centro della loro politica estera la protezione e la promozione del diritto di libertà religiosa. Le istituzioni e le politiche che sono seguite hanno permesso agli Stati Uniti di ergersi a modello di iniziativa per la tutela della libertà religiosa nell’arena globale. Lungi dal rimanere un esperimento isolato, l’iniziativa statunitense ha influenzato l’Unione Europea, il Canada, il Regno Unito e l’Italia. Il volume analizza il modello normativo-istituzionale americano e passa in rassegna i sistemi che ad esso si sono ispirati. Ne risulta una libertà religiosa indebolita nella sua concezione universale ed unitaria e minacciata da specifici interessi politici e nazionali.
[With the adoption in 1998 of the International Religious Freedom Act the United States placed the protection and promotion of religious freedom at the center of its foreign policy. The institutions and politics that followed allowed the United States to raise up its initiative as a model for the defense of religious freedom in the global arena. Far from being an isolated experiment, the US initiative has influenced the European Union, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Italy. This volume analyzes the American normative-institutional model and surveys the systems that it has inspired. What has resulted is the weakening of religious freedom as a universal conception, threatened by specific political and national interests.]
The Library of Law and Liberty has posted my review of Gerard Russell’s Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, a new book on Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East. Russell describes the history and present circumstances of these groups, including their struggle to emigrate and find new homes in places like the United States:
Will these communities survive in their new environments? Russell hopes so. He describes some touching examples of endurance, like the time he heard a clerk speaking Aramaic in a supermarket in suburban Detroit. But he wonders how long it can last. For all its great achievements, America has a way of destroying traditional identities, and it’s difficult to maintain one’s distinctive customs for very long. He wonders whether escape to the West isn’t “a back-loaded contract for immigrant communities—get the benefit of prosperity now, pay the loss of identity later.” Still, it beats annihilation, which is what threatens these groups at home.
As regular readers know, I’ve spent this week at a terrific new program at the Fondazione Marcianum in Venice, an international moot court competition on law and religion. The Marcianum gathered law student teams from the US and Europe to argue a hypothetical case before two courts, the European Court of Human Rights and the US Supreme Court. Along with Notre Dame’s Bill Kelley and Judge (and CLR Board member) Richard Sullivan of the SDNY, I served as a judge on the American court. That’s us, in action, above. Mark Hill of Cardiff University, Renata Uitz of Central European University, and Louis-Leon Christians of Catholic University of Louvain made up the European side. Both courts were ably assisted by PhD students from the Marcianum, who served as our shadow clerks, helping us with research and the development of our ideas.
The case was a very topical one. A private, family owned firm had dismissed an employee for making a negative comment about creationism, in violation of the business’s code of conduct, which prohibited anti-religious statements. In the European version, the domestic courts ruled in favor of the firm, and the employee brought a claim under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In the American version, the employee sued for employment discrimination, arguing that he had been dismissed on account of his religious views; the employer maintained that, even if Title VII applied, RFRA allowed for an accommodation in these circumstances.
Lots of issues here, and the student teams did a remarkable job addressing them. Special credit goes to the two Italian teams, from the Universities of Milan and Macerata,who had to learn an entirely new legal system and argue in a foreign language. In the end, our panel gave the 500 euro award for best team to the entrants from Emory Law School. They did their school, and especially Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, proud. On the European side, the award went to the team from Inner Temple.
This was an absolutely wonderful event. It was a lot of work for the students and the judges (not that I’m complaining!), but extremely valuable and tremendous fun. I imagine the most valuable aspect, for the students, was learning how another legal system would handle these issues. The Americans were struck by the argument style in the European Court — 30 minutes of presentation followed by five minutes to answer questions from the bench — and the Europeans were surprised at the more assertive, freewheeling style of argument in an American court. But they adjusted very well.
I hope the Marcianum continues this event. Law and religion has gone global, and comparative law is an increasingly important component of a legal education on both sides of the Atlantic. I’ll write more when I return to NY, but, for now, a very warm thank you to the Marcianum for hosting this event, and especially to Professor Andrea Pin, who invited me and had a major role in the entire enterprise. And thanks to the readers of our blog who stopped by to say hello!
Next week, I’ll be in Venice for a new, three-day international law-and-religion moot court competition. Hosted by a research institute, the Fondazione Studium Generale Marcianum, the competition brings together law students from the US and Europe to argue a case on religious accommodation. I’ll be one of the American judges, along with Judge Richard Sullivan of the SDNY (and one of CLR’s Board members) and Professor William Kelley of Notre Dame Law School.
The organizers of the competition have come up with an interesting new approach. Two noted scholars, Silvio Ferrari of the University of Milan and Brett Scharffs of BYU, will offer an overview of the issues for the audience, and then the student teams will argue the case before two moot courts, one simulating the American Supreme Court and the other simulating the European Court of Human Rights. (The European judges are Louis-Leon Christians of the Catholic University of Louvain, Mark Hill of Cardiff University, and Renata Uitz of Central European University Budapest.) On the final day of the competition, each court will render a judgment and announce the winning team.
The Marcianum”s approach to the competition highlights the fact that law and religion issues have gone international. And it introduces students, especially American students, to the comparative legal method. It should be a wonderful learning experience and a lot of fun, and I’m grateful to the organizers, especially Professor Andrea Pin of the University of Padua, for inviting me. Any of our readers at the competition, please stop by and say hello. I’ll try to blog from Venice if occasion allows. Not sure you can blog from a gondola, though.
This past Wednesday, the Center for Law and Religion co-sponsored a panel, “Threat to Justice: Middle Eastern Christians and the ISIS Crisis,” at the St. John’s Law School campus in Queens. The Catholic Law Students Association, and, especially, this year’s energetic president, Eugene Ubawike ’15, took the lead in organizing the event, which was also endorsed by the Law School’s Center for International and Comparative Law. I served as moderator.
Eugene introduced the panel by referring to the martyrdom of 21 Coptic Christians at the hands of ISIS operatives in Libya last weekend. The martyrdom of Christians is not something one reads about only in history books, he said–persecution is happening right now. In my introduction, I followed up on Eugene’s comments by reminding the audience of what Pope Francis said at our conference in Rome this past summer: there are more Christian martyrs today than in the first centuries of the Church, since before the time of Constantine, 1700 years ago.
Michael LaCivita, the Chief Communications Officer of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, explained the mission of his organization and helpfully situated the discussion by giving a brief history of the Christians of the Middle East. Mark Wasef, an attorney and member of the board of United for a New Egypt, provided an overview of the situation Christians face in contemporary Egypt. He spoke movingly of the troubles Copts have faced in recent years, but also of the possibility of peaceful relations between Christians and Muslims, and his hopes for the future. A robust question and answer session touched on topics like the dhimma, the promise of the Sisi government in Egypt, Mideast Christians in American politics, and the legacy of the Crusades.
This is not the first panel on Mideast Christians that CLR has sponsored at the Law School, and, as at the event we sponsored in October 2010, turnout on Wednesday night was encouraging, a sign that the Law School community takes this issue seriously. Congratulations to Eugene and the Catholic Law Students Association for an important event in the life of St. John’s, and many thanks to our panelists.
L-R: Noel Francisco, MLM, Judge Brian Cogan, David Schaefer
On Monday, I participated in a panel discussion, “The Evolution and Implications of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” at the Federal Bar Council’s annual Winter Bench & Bar Conference. (Honor compels me to reveal that the conference took place at the Casa de Campo resort in the Dominican Republic, where the February weather is much nicer than in Queens. But I returned to Queens right after my panel to teach my classes. The sacrifices scholars make). Founded in 1932, the Council is an organization of lawyers who practice in federal courts within the Second Circuit. The winter conference attracts not only lawyers, but also judges–Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is on the program this year–and discussions are substantive and enlightening.
My panel concerned a topic we’ve covered often here at the Forum, namely, religious accommodations under RFRA. I gave a twenty-minute overview of the topic, addressing the history of religious accommodations in American law, RFRA itself, the Court’s decisions last term in Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College, and their immediate aftermath. Moderator Judge Brian Cogan (EDNY) then led the discussion, which included a mock argument on a hypothetical case involving the federal Family and Medical Leave Act–attorneys Steven Edwards (Hogan Lovells) and Steven Hyman (McLaughlin & Stern) took opposite sides–and interventions by Noel Francisco (Jones Day) and David Schaefer (Brenner Saltzman & Wallman). We wrapped up with audience Q&A.
I wasn’t the only member of the Center family to participate in the conference. Board member Mary Kay Vyskocil (Simpson Thacher) worked hard to coordinate the RFRA panel, though she unfortunately could not attend the conference, and Board member Judge Richard Sullivan (SDNY) will appear on a panel later this week.
Thanks to the Council for inviting me and to my fellow panelists for an engaging discussion!
The Center for Law and Religion invites you to join us for a conversation with United States District Judge Richard J. Sullivan (left) about current and potential issues before the U.S. Supreme Court involving religious freedom. Topics will include the ongoing contraception mandate litigation, conflicts between the rights of same-sex couples and rights of religious conscience, and the future of religious freedom in the United States. Light refreshments will be provided.
