The Floersheimer Center at Cardozo Law School has posted a video (below) of last week’s panel discussion on “The Supreme Court and New Frontiers in Religious Liberty,” in which I was honored to participate, along with Nelson Tebbe (Cornell), Elizabeth Reiner Platt (Columbia Law), and Giselle Klapper (Sikh Coalition) . Thanks again to Michael Pollak, Hui Yang, and the Floersheimer team for having me–and for hosting a cordial and productive exchange of disparate views in the best tradition of the legal academy.
Discussion on the Role of Tradition in Constitutional Law at CUA
Here’s another event in which I’ll be participating at Catholic University, this one a discussion on Thursday at 12:30 with Professor Ernest Young and Professor Kevin Walsh, The Role of Tradition in Constitutional Law. The event is part of CUA’s Project on Constitutional Originalism and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (though some renegade non-originalists like me sometimes sneak in, too!). Again, the event will be recorded, but if you are in town, please stop by and say hello!
Speaking at Cardozo Tomorrow
Just a note that I’ll participate in a panel discussion on the Supreme Court’s free exercise jurisprudence tomorrow at Cardozo Law School’s Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy:
The Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy is proud to present The Supreme Court and New Frontiers in Religious Liberty. Join us for a conversation with First Amendment experts and practitioners to discuss the future of First Amendment Free Exercise and Establishment Clause jurisprudence.
Cardozo Professor Michael Pollack will lead a discussion on the Court’s jurisprudence and its impact on civil liberties, religious liberty, and separation of church and state. Panelists include Cornell Professor of Law Nelson Tebbe (author of “Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age”), St. John’s Professor of Law Mark Movsesian (co-director of The Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s University Law School), Elizabeth Reiner Platt (Director of Columbia’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project), and Giselle Klapper (Sikh Coalition Senior Staff Attorney).
Proof of vaccination is required. Masks are required.
Details about tickets below. Friends of CLR, please stop by and say hello!
Inaugural Conference of the Center for Law and the Human Person at CUA
I am delighted to be participating in this conference at Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, next Tuesday, which inaugurates the new Center for Law and the Human Person, directed by Elizabeth Kirk. The theme of the conference is “Rightly Ordered Law and the Flourishing of the Human Person.”
The title of my talk is “Notes on a New Humanism in Legal Education.” I’m told the conference will be recorded, but if you are in DC, please register at the link and do stop by and say hello! I’ll have more to say about the substance of the talk by and by.
St. Vartan and Christian Identity
Every February, the Armenian Church, to which I belong, commemorates St. Vartan, a fifth century warrior saint who died in a battle against the Persian Empire, which sought to forcibly convert Armenians from Christianity to Zoroastrianism. Vartan and his companions lost the battle of Avarayr, but the rebellion he led continued and eventually succeeded a generation later under his nephew, Vahan. The Persian Empire abandoned the campaign to eradicate Christianity in Armenia and Armenians have remained Christians ever since.
Last week, St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in New York City invited me to give the keynote address at its annual commemoration of St. Vartan Day. My remarks addressed what the story of Vartan and his companions reveals about the links between Christianity and cultural identity. Like Joan of Arc, and unlike most warrior saints, Vartan represents a specifically national expression of Christianity, not Christianity-in-General. I also addressed the story’s resonance today, when Armenians once again face existential peril in Karabakh. In case my remarks may interest a wider audience, the church has posted my remarks at this link.
Here’s an excerpt:
The story of Vartan and his companions is a stirring one and, for us Armenian Christians, a miracle: the working out of a Providential design that included abandonment, failure, betrayal, and sacrifice—but also courage and perseverance and ultimate victory. It is also a story that resonates in our own time. Once again, today, Armenians face grave danger from an external enemy that seeks to eliminate a specifically Armenian Christian identity in our historic home, and once again the situation looks dire. As we gather this evening, the Azeri government is blockading 120,000 Armenian Christians in Artsakh in an attempt to force them to leave the region—an obvious ethnic cleansing campaign. In his roughly contemporaneous account of Vartan and his companions, written at the end of the Fifth Century, Ghazar Parpetsi tells his readers that he will describe “events, times and occurrences in the land of Armenia over the turbulent centuries, periods of occasional peace and times of intense and endless confusion.” Today Armenians are again living through a “time of intense confusion,” about what is happening in our homeland and how we can best respond, both in our homeland and in a diaspora that extends far beyond what Parpetsi could ever have imagined.
There are many ways to understand the story of Vartan and his companions: in terms of imperial politics, military strategy, or even economics. Parpetsi writes of how rich the land of Armenia was, how tempting a prize for the Persian king. But I would like to reflect this evening on two aspects of the story. The first is what the story reveals about the link between Christianity and Armenian identity. For us, and for the people around us, Christianity is the essential element in our culture—the thing that distinguishes us from our neighbors and that, periodically, makes them perceive our collective existence as a challenge. Second, I would like to reflect on what the story reveals about the need for perseverance and shrewdness in the face of oppression and about the ultimate victory of God’s plan.
Symposium on the Rise of the Nones and American Law
The Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s Law School invites you to attend: The Rise of the Nones and American Law. Millions of Americans—perhaps as high as 30% of the adult population—now tell surveyors that they have no religious affiliation. Most of these Americans, the “Nones,” do not reject belief, but traditional religious organizations. They have their own, personal spiritual commitments that draw on many sources. The Nones, who are beginning to show up in the case law, have the potential to transform establishment and free exercise jurisprudence.
Join us for a panel discussion about these issues with Professors Steven Collis (University of Texas Law School), Mark Movsesian (St. John’s), Gregory Sisk (University of St. Thomas School of Law), and Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York). This event is co-sponsored by the ST. JOHN’S JOURNAL OF CATHOLIC LEGAL STUDIES.
Date
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Time
5:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Location
New York Athletic Club
180 Central Park South
New York, NY 10019
Register to Attend
The event is free, but space is limited, so please register in advance (When registering, use password SPRING).
Sixth Session of the CLR Reading Society: Miller’s “Canticle” & MacIntyre’s “After Virtue”
Mark and I are pleased to announce the sixth session of our CLR Reading Society, an opportunity open to all St. John’s Law Students to discuss works of fiction and non-fiction raising law and religion themes.
Our choice for this gathering is somewhat unusual, as it combines a work of science-fiction/fantasy and another of moral philosophy: the first story in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and selected chapters of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. A Canticle concerns a world ravaged by a series of environmental disasters, in which human knowledge and scientific achievement have not only been destroyed but are also blamed for the devastation by the Know-Nothing political power that survives. An order of obscure monks in the desert wasteland attempts to preserve and revive knowledge, but all its members have to go on are fragments of the past, disconnected from the theoretical structures of meaning and understanding within which they made sense. Miller’s tale about what recovery of learning in the ruins of such a civilization would look like was taken up by MacIntyre in After Virtue as the opening chapter’s inspiration for reflecting on the nature of moral and political disagreement today.
St. John’s Law students interested in the CLR Reading Society should contact Professor DeGirolami, marc.degirolami@stjohns.edu, or Professor Movsesian, movsesim@stjohns.edu. Books (both of them, for this session) are provided for free to students and all are welcome. We will meet on the evening of Tuesday, April 11, to discuss these works, so students who would like to join us and require books should write to us as soon as possible. Further details are forthcoming.
Last Week’s Panel on “Law and Religion at the Supreme Court”
Here’s a nice writeup on the law school website of last week’s panel, “Law and Religion at the Supreme Court: New Directions,” with Judges Richard Sullivan (CA2) and Rachel Kovner (EDNY). Thanks to everyone who turned out on a rainy night!
The American Academy of Catholic Scholars and Artists
I am delighted to participate in a panel at the annual conference of the American Academy of Catholic Scholars and Artists which will be convened over the next few days. I’ll be responding to Professor Frank Beckwith’s fine lecture on the legacy of Dignitatis Humanae, the important (and still controversial) Vatican II Declaration of 1965 concerning religious freedom. I’m honored (and just a bit daunted) to be responding just after Professor J. Budziszewski, whose scholarly contributions to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas have been a great help to me over the years. See, for example, his indispensable Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law and his Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics.
I’m particularly excited to be part of this gathering because, by design, it combines scholarly and artistic/literary reflection on the many contributions of Catholicism. I have a new project, just now beginning to take shape (and about which more soon!) that, I hope, will reflect this union of interests and aims in its own way.
“Public-Private Drift”
Here’s a new paper of mine, Public-Private Drift, examining the growing proclivity to blend public law and private law in order to mold behavior and coerce it into certain ideological grooves. The paper explores the phenomenon in a variety of contexts today. Here is the abstract:
The public law/private law divide is back. Scholars with a broad range of theoretical commitments are attempting to rediscover or reestablish the division. This paper approaches the public-private law problem by describing what it calls “drift.” Drift is the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be private law to become public (public drift), and the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be public law to become private (private drift). Though it is possible to distinguish public and private drift conceptually, drift is in practice a unified phenomenon: public and private drift go together. Drift is manifested not only in formal, legal developments, but also in the informal processes by which public law frameworks now influence private ordering, private rulemaking, and private relationships, as well as the way private authorities have been entrusted with the responsibility to implement those public law frameworks.
This paper’s perspective on the public-private debate is explanatory. It accepts that many people perceive or believe American law to be in some sense divided into public and private domains, without endorsing that perception or belief. It does so in order better to describe the coming of drift. Even if one were skeptical about the conceptual purity of public and private law, one might nevertheless believe that what is public and private is a question of more and less, of greater and lesser degrees, and that there can be periods of relative stability in these categories and relative disruption. The paper describes various contemporary examples of drift, explains drift’s comparative ascendancy today, and speculates about possible future developments for drift.
The upshot is that drift in public and private law may not be driven primarily by anything innate or conceptually necessary in the disciplines believed to constitute private or public law. Drift is instead a political byproduct, the issue of social and cultural anxieties concerning the absence of anything like a common political project. The paper deliberately selects examples of drift that exhibit what would be conventionally described as conservative and progressive valences (in the meteoric rise of public nuisance, in the strategy of statutes like Texas’ S.B. 8, in the mixed public-private response to COVID-19, in the controversies about social media speech control, and others) to illustrate the universality of the phenomenon. Drift is a response to a perceived political void or emptiness in which public-private partnerships of powerful actors emerge to fill the void, capture the institutions of power, and coerce people’s behavior into certain ideological grooves. Drift is, in sum, a reaction to social fragmentation that ironically and unhappily exacerbates the pathologies that provoke it in the first place.