Human dignity is ubiquitous in contemporary constitutional law, yet its meaning varies across jurisdictions and even among judges. In a new essay at Emory’s Canopy Forum, I review my friend Andrea Pin’s new book, Dignity in Judgment, which challenges the conventional view that dignity is solely a secular, autonomy-based concept and highlights its religious and communal roots. While I agree with Andrea that dignity has multiple intellectual sources, I argue that courts today overwhelmingly rely on a secular understanding in practice. This convergence, I suggest, reflects the intellectual formation and shared legal culture of judges, who interpret dignity through familiar frameworks shaped by modern constitutionalism.
I’ll be interviewing Andrea about his book in an upcoming Legal Spirits podcast, so please stay tuned! Meanwhle, you can read the full review here.
I’m very much looking forward to lecturing at the University of Padua next week on judicial review in the United States. Thanks to my friend, Professor Andrea Pin, for the kind invitation to meet with his law students. Details below. Friends of the Forum, please stop by and say hello!
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.
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:
I’m a little late getting to this, but a few months ago, the Australian Journal of Law and Religion and Emory’s Canopy Forum jointly published a valuable symposium on the rise of the Nones, with a lead article by Jeremy Patrick (University of South Queensland) that responds to some of my writings on the topic. Jeremy and I come to different judgments about whether Nones should qualify as a religion for legal purposes. Jeremy is persuaded they should; I am skeptical. But it’s always nice to receive careful criticism of one’s work, and I’m grateful to Jeremy and to the symposium’s organizers. You can read Jeremy’s essay, titled “A Brief Rejoinder to Movsesian on ‘The New Thoreaus,'” here.
And, continuing the wedding vendor theme from the last post, my draft paper on the wedding vendor cases, “Status, Conduct, Belief, and Message,” is now available for downloading on the SSRN site. The paper will appear in a forthcoming symposium edition of the Chicago-Kent Law Review. Comments welcome! Here’s the abstract:
This essay explores the constitutional and cultural tensions underlying the “wedding vendor cases,” in which small business owners decline from religious conviction to provide services for same-sex weddings. Litigants often invoke conceptual distinctions among status, conduct, belief, and message, but these distinctions are too indeterminate to resolve the cases in a principled way. The ultimate question is whether LGBT rights should override religious and expressive freedoms in the marketplace. In two recent wedding vendor cases, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court has avoided addressing this fundamental question directly. Instead, the Court has issued narrow rulings based on specific facts and party stipulations, thereby limiting the broader implications of its decisions. While this strategy sacrifices doctrinal clarity and leaves lower courts grappling with uncertainty, it also helps avoid exacerbating cultural polarization on an intensely divisive issue. In the current political climate, incremental case-by-case adjudication—a sort of “passive virtues” approach—may represent a prudent judicial strategy, even if it leaves both sides of the cultural divide dissatisfied.
I was delighted to join my friend and former colleague, Marc DeGirolami, and my friend and Marc’s current colleague, Kevin Walsh, as a guest last week on their excellent podcast, Sub Deo. We discussed the Supreme Court’s recent wedding vendor cases, Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative. I have a draft on the subject on the SSRN site and thought I’d heard everything about the cases, but Marc and Kevin came up with new and profound questions for me to think about. It was great fun and I thank Marc and Kevin for the opportunity to kick around some ideas. The link is here:
For people who are interested, over at Law & Liberty, I have an essay on the 60th anniversary of Gore Vidal’s classic film on presidential nominating conventions, 1964’s “The Best Man.” I’ve always loved the film, which captures some of the fun and banality of democratic politics–as well as its deeply cynical, even nihilistic side. Very relevant this election year. Here’s an excerpt:
This year marks the 60th anniversary of perhaps the greatest political film of all time, 1964’s The Best Man. Based on a play of the same name by Gore Vidal, who also wrote the screenplay, The Best Man tells the story of a deadlocked political convention at which two candidates vie for their party’s presidential nomination. Sixty years on, the film remains tremendously entertaining: clever, suspenseful, with an exceptional cast. The dialogue is outstanding. Considering what we have witnessed in the current presidential campaign—and it’s only August—Americans might again find interest in Vidal’s depiction of the backroom intrigue that determines a nomination.
The Best Man holds up for its mordant but profound observations about American democracy. There’s not much idealism here. The film’s most principled character has flaws that make him unfit to lead and the ultimate nominee is a “nobody” whose lack of record is his best quality. But there are important lessons about the sort of person who seeks high office in a democracy—and the sort of person high office requires. Perhaps surprisingly, given that Vidal was a man of the Left and had a rather acid personality, The Best Man offers a basically fair, even forgiving, depiction of progressives and conservatives. Neither are wholly good nor wholly bad, just human.
In this podcast, Marc and Mark discuss some of the common themes in two books that we recently read and reflected on with our students in the Center’s Reading Society: Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. The themes include the nature and value of knowledge, the fragmentary quality of moral discourse today, and the question whether (law) teachers are, or should be, (more like) monks (than anything else). Listen in!
