We’re back after a bit of a hiatus with a new Legal Spirits episode. Center Director Mark Movsesian talks with Professors Andrea Pin and Luca Vanoni about the International Moot Court Competition in Law and Religion, an annual event that gathers law students from the US and Europe to argue a case before panels representing the European Court of Human Rights and the US Supreme Court. Andrea and Luca discuss how they came up with the idea for this unique competition, its pedagogical goals, and why it has succeeded for a decade and counting. Listen in!
On January 23, 2025, the Mattone Center for Law and Religion hosted the inaugural Center Directors Summit, a gathering of directors of law and religion centers and clinics across the United States. Participants at the event, which took place at the New York Athletic Club, included the directors of centers and clinics at Brigham Young, Emory, Harvard, Notre Dame, Pepperdine, St. John’s, Stanford, and Villanova Universities, The Catholic University of America, and the University of Texas.
The day began with three private roundtables addressing mission, scholarship, curricula, and programs. Participants spoke about the role of law and religion centers and clinics and the benefits they can provide for law professors, students, and the public more generally.
The summit continued with two panel presentations for Mattone Center student fellows, board members, alumni, and friends, moderated by Judge Richard Sullivan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, at which participants shared key insights from the earlier roundtables. You can find a video of the panels here:
It was great to get together with colleagues and friends to talk about our successes, challenges, and plans for the future. I came away from the summit with ideas for our program here at St. John’s, and I’m sure that’s true of the other participants as well. So many law schools in the US have law and religion centers and clinics, yet no one has thought before to bring the directors together to share notes and see how we can continue to provide a benefit legal education in the US. This summit was a great first step, and I hope it will continue on a rotating basis.
In this episode, Fordham Law Professors Sean Griffith and Richard Squire join Mattone Center Director Mark Movsesian to talk about their experience leading a discussion of CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity in a student reading group this past semester. Sean and Richard discuss their goals in establishing the group, their students’ response to Lewis–in particular, his defense of natural law and Christian ethics–and the value of taking Christianity seriously as a matter of faith and intellect at a 21st-century American law school. A fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. Listen in!
This Friday, January 26, the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies (a publication of St. John’s University School of Law) will host a symposium on the new casebook Christian Legal Thought: Materials and Cases (2017) by Patrick M. Brennan (Villanova) and William S. Brewbaker III (University of Alabama). The symposium will take place at the New York Athletic Club in Manhattan from 3 PM to 6 PM, with a reception at the Club following from 6 PM to 7 PM. It will feature as panelists both casebook authors, as well as Professors Randy Beck (University of Georgia), Angela C. Carmella (Seton Hall), Richard W. Garnett (Notre Dame), Michael P. Moreland (Villanova), and David A. Skeel, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania). The event is free and open to the public (please note the New York Athletic Club’s dress guidelines). More information, including whom to contact with questions, is available here. The January 19 deadline to RSVP has been extended to January 25.
As we prepare to start a new academic year, the Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog offers a rundown of some new courses at American law schools:
• At Pepperdine Law School in California, students will search for answers to contemporary problems in the Bible. “Law and the Bible” will explore “how the Bible addresses the challenging legal issues of our day—the breakdown of the family, the death penalty, abortion, poverty, climate change, gay marriage, human trafficking, immigration, and the separation of church and state.”
• At Harvard, students will be seeking advice from Friedrich Nietzsche.“The premise is that provocation by this Master Provocateur may be just the therapy that law students need,” says the description of “Nietzsche for Lawyers,” taught by criminal law professor Richard Parker. There’s no exam, but “soft drinks, wine and snacks will be provided.”
When law professors grouse behind closed doors, one of their favorite topics is how law students lack fundamental knowledge and skills they were supposed to get in high school and college. According to prevailing wisdom, law students don’t know how to write a proper sentence, are ignorant of the most basic historical facts, have no concept of economics, and couldn’t construct a syllogism to save their lives.
Much of this is curmudgeonly hazing of the young by the old that is a regularized and institutionalized rite of one’s transition from youth to age. “In the good old days, we actually learned things in school.” Having passed the forty-year mark and hence being an official curmudgeon, I shall indulge in a little whining of my own. My complaint is the lack of basic religious literacy among law students.
To be fair, this is not just a phenomenon of law students or the young more generally. A 2010 Pew survey found an appalling lack of religious knowledge in the United States, which is by many measures a highly religious country. More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as a leader of the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews didn’t know that Maimonides was Jewish. Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in the Eucharist becomes the body and blood of Christ. (Interestingly, atheists and agnostics scored higher than religious adherents in the survey).
It’s my sense that the mainstream of the American educational system eschews teaching about religion, not necessarily out of hostility, but out of a fear that religion is too hot and divisive a topic to handle in polite company. The demise of universal Sunday School or Read more
Sherman J. Clark (U. of Mich. Law School) has posted To Teach and Persuade. The abstract follows.
Legal speech and religious speech inevitably do some of the same work. Both are vehicles through which we both talk about and become the kind of people we are. Granted, those of us who teach and argue about the law do not often conceive of our work in this way. That is part of what I hope to begin to remedy in this essay. While the construction of character is a more obvious aspect of religious than legal thought, law, including legal argument, can be constitutive in similar ways. If so–if our ways of talking about the law serve some of the same ends as do our ways of talking about religion–then we may be able to learn how better to talk about the law by thinking about how we talk about religion. I do not mean things like paragraph structure or argument organization or the proper use of headings, but rather something more subtle and more fundamental. One way to put it is this: legal speech can learn from religious speech how to be less small, and perhaps more ennobling.
More specifically, those of us who speak and teach about the law may be able to learn from religious ways of speaking and preaching how better to Read more
A couple of days ago, I posted about the controversy surrounding a proposed new Christian law school in Canada. I questioned whether it’s a good idea to found a new law school in the current environment and wondered whether Canadian law would allow the proposed school, at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, to require its students, faculty and staff to adhere to traditional Christian sexual ethics. Over at First Thoughts, Dr. Janet Epp-Buckingham, a professor at Trinity Western and member of the group that developed the proposal for the new school, objected to some elements of my post, and I offered her the chance to respond more fully. Janet’s response follows below:
Mark Movsesian wrote a blog on January 22 questioning the wisdom of trying to start a law school at Trinity Western University. The university has a 50 year history and is located in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. Mark based some of his concerns on the downturn for lawyers and law schools in the U.S. While legal education has had its issues in the last few years in Canada, the situation is much different in Canada than in the U.S. Actually, the whole university structure is much different, and more regulated, in Canada.
Trinity Western is the largest of only a handful of Christian universities in Canada. There are very few private universities. Most universities are public universities and subsidized by provincial governments. Before a new program can start at any university, public or private, it must be approved Read more
I’m posting today from the biannual Conference of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools (RALS), hosted this year by Sam Levine at Touro. The first panel this morning, on which I participated, was titled “The Place of Law and Religion Institutes in the Law School and University.” The panel made clear how many such institutes exist in American law schools and how diverse are their interests. I spoke about our Center for Law and Religion here at St. John’s. Our center focuses on religion as a legal and sociological phenomenon and treats the subject from a broadly interfaith and comparative perspective. Elizabeth Schiltz, director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy at St. Thomas, described her center as having a slightly different focus, rooted more specifically in the Catholic intellectual and legal tradition. Elizabeth Clark, associate director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU, described her center’s primary concern as promoting religious freedom around the world. Of course, there is a lot of overlap in the matters the centers cover. Yet the diversity of focus is a great sign that law and religion is a growth area in American law schools and that there is plenty of work to go around.
This Friday, January 26, the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies (a publication of St. John’s University School of Law) will host a symposium on the new casebook