The Religiously Affiliated Law Schools

Touro in 2012!

2010-09-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

After considering an excellent set of proposals, the RALS Executive Committee has selected Touro Law School in Central Islip, New York to host the 2012 Conference. It will be the first RALS conference to be held at a Jewish-affiliated school.

The conference will be coordinated by Professor Samuel J. Levine, who serves as Professor of Law and Director of the Jewish Law Institute.

Details about the theme of the conference, the date, and ways you can participate will be announced in the upcoming months.

RALS 2010 at BYU

2010-01-13T09:09:00.000-08:00

Here is the info, with even more at this link.

2010 Conference of Religiously Affilliated Law Schools

J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University

Room 472

Thursday, March 18, 2010

9:00-9:15 am Introduction
Associate Dean Kif Augustine-Adams, BYU

9:15-10:15 am Plenary Session
H. Reese Hansen, President, Association of American Law Schools and Howard W. Hunter Professor Law, BYU

10:15-10:30 am Break

10:30 am-12:00 pm Panel: The Role of Ministering As Well As Administering in the Law School Community

Scott Cameron, BYU (Chair)
Lindsay P. Watkins, Project Manager, Law School Survey of Student Engagement
Wendy C. Archibald, BYU

12:15-1:30 pm Lunch: Hinckley Alumni Building
Welcome: Dean James Rasband, BYU Law School

1:45-3:15 pm Panel: Sacred Texts Part I: The Role of Sacred Texts and Traditions in Informing Our Understanding and Engagement of Jurisprudence

David Dominguez, BYU (Chair)
John Welch, BYU
Steven Goldberg, Georgetown U.
[Other speaker invited]

3:30-3:45 pm Break

3:45-5:15 pm Panel: Judges, Kings, Prophets, and Lawyers in Biblical and American Perspectives

Samuel Levine, Pepperdine U. (Chair)
Zach Calo, Valparaiso U.: Catholic/Anglican Perspective
David Vlatto, Penn. State U.: Jewish Perspective
Robert Cochran, Pepperdine U.
Mark Graber, U. of Maryland

5:30 pm Box Dinner

5:30 pm Tabernacle Choir Rehearsal in Salt Lake City

6:15 pm Buses depart
8:00 pm Tabernacle Choir Rehearsal
9:45 pm Busses return to Provo

Friday, March 19, 2010

8:15-9:00 am Continental Breakfast, BYU Law School

9:00-10:30 am Plenary Session: Relevant and Reliable Rankings Criteria for Religiously Affiliated Law Schools
David Thomas, BYU

10:30-10:45 am Break

10:45 am-12:15 pm Sacred Texts Part II: Texts, Law and Life

Thomas Folsom, Regent U.: "Disintegrating Norms in Cyberspace: Future Law and the Relevance of Ancient Sacred Texts (Is There a Common Morality for a Global/Tech Era?)"
Collin Mangrum, Creighton: "Religious Text as Authoritative Sources for Legal Reasoning: The Israeli Experience"
Hank Chambers, Richmond: "Biblical Interpretation and Ignoring Text"

12:30-2:00 pm Lunch: Wilkinson Student Center

2:15-4:00 pm Practicing Religion in the Classroom, Court Room, and Marketplace

David Koelsch, U. of Detroit-Mercy: "Promoting Consolation Among Law Students and Attorneys: Incorporating the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola into the Law School Curriculum"
Sherman Cohn, Georgetown U.: "Teaching Jewish Law at Georgetown"
Kristin Gerdy, BYU: "Clients, Empathy, and Compassion: Introducing First-Year Law Students to the ‘Heart’ of Lawyering"
Bill Piatt, St. Mary’s U.: "Catholicism and Constitutional Law: More Than Privacy in the Penumbras"
Rodney Dale Chrisman, Liberty: "Seeking Filthy Lucre: The Historic Christian Teaching on the Goodness of Commercial Activity as the Overarching Purpose of the UCC"

4:00-4:15 pm Break

4:15-5:00 pm Closing Session/Idea Exchange for the Future

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Optional Activity Tour of LDS Humanitarian Services Center Exchange in Salt Lake City

Registration
The cost of the conference is $175.00 per person, which will cover the lunches, dinner and continental breakfast, and the Thursday excursion to Salt Lake City. Guests may attend and participate in the meal and excursion functions for a fee of $75.00. You may register online by clicking here, or you may download a printable PDF, and send it with your check (made out to Brigham Young University Law School) to:

Adrian Selle
Room 405
J. Reuben Clark Law School
Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah 84602

RALS At The AALS!

2009-10-05T07:44:00.001-07:00

The Religiously Affiliated Law Schools will be hosting a reception at the AALS Hiring Conference this year. The reception will be held from 7:30 09:00 in the Hoover room, on Thursday, Nov. 5. We hope to see you there!

BYU Conference coming together

2009-09-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

The 2010 Conference of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools will be at Brigham Young University March 18-19, which is a Thursday/Friday.

The theme will be “Blessing the Lives of Our Students,” and while several panels are still in the planning stages, there will be panels on the Law School Survey of Student Engagement and the role of sacred texts and traditions in our understanding of jurisprudence.

An announcement and a call for papers should be available soon.

Do Rankings Punish Religiously-Affiliated Schools?

2009-04-27T13:02:00.001-07:00

It seems possible, given the reputational rankings given some religiously-affiliated schools. See the very good discussion here.

The Charge and Embrace of Discrimination

2008-12-02T09:20:00.000-08:00

One thing that is distinctive about religiously-affiliated schools is that we very often discriminate in hiring. Specifically, in diverse ways, we favor members of our faith over those who are not a part of that faith. Within our group, we vary from schools that have almost no religious favoritism in hiring to those who hire only from members of the faith (or those willing to live under its strictures). My own school, Baylor, is probably more towards the restrictive end of this continuum-- our University demands a relatively close inspection of a candidate's faith, and our current law faculty contains no non-Christians.

Critics of this type of discrimination properly point out that it limits the viewpoints a student is exposed to, and may restrict the debate within the faculty.

However, those problems are costs which many institutions are willing to bear in order to retain their denominational identity, foster the views professed by the sponsoring faith, and provide diversity to the larger national discussion on legal issues from a place of moral certainty.

What I wonder at times is how intentional all this is-- that is, are we sure we are getting the benefits that would justify the costs?

Throwing Bombs

2008-11-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

As I read legal scholarship these days, I see many pieces analyzing doctrines, tracing historical developments, seeking adjustments to parts of rules or laws, and suggesting new "perspectives," but very few that broadly attack a law or practice as fundamentally unjust. We have many exceptional analysts and commentators, but few bomb-throwers, and those that exist often are outside the core of elite institutions.

It could be that we are fortunate enough to live in a nation without unjust laws, but I doubt that many of us would truly agree with that statement. Given that most of us would agree that there are unjust laws, why are we not more focused on attacking them? I suspect that at least two factors dampen the excitement for overarching reform within legal scholarship.

First, we do live in a society where the laws are the product of a democratic process. Thus, if we identify a law as unjust, we are suggesting either a flaw in the process or that the majority of people in our nation are not only wrong about something, but at some level that they are fundamentally, morally wrong. Understandably, we are reluctant to attack our democracy or our fellow citizens.

Second, to call a law unjust requires a position from which to determine justice as a moral position. Legal philosophers discuss this in depth, but generally not in connection to a live issue, while the rest of us are often uncomfortable with the ideas of positivism or natural law, and certainly loath to connect a contemporary debate to either.

It does seem to me that many of the worthwhile challenges to unjust law is coming from those speaking from a position of faith. It could be that this is a particular strength of ours, and one that we should consciously encourage amongst our members, while acknowledging that there will likely be divergent views about which laws are unjust and for what reason.

-- Mark Osler

Gearing up for AALS

2008-11-18T11:53:00.000-08:00

Under the leadership of our own John Garvey of BC, the January AALS meeting sounds great. The theme is "institutional pluralism," and a part of that theme is the range of schools which includes the 49 religiously-affiliated law programs.

There can be little doubt among those of us active in RALS that we offer something different than state or other private schools, and that there is also great diversity even among our own ranks. One feature of our conferences I always find fascinating is the different answers we come to on questions we agree to be important. Those conversations are one good reason to keep our schools and our organization strong, vital, and engaged with the rest of the legal academy.

Christians and the Payday Loan Industry

2008-11-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

I was interested to stumble across this fascinating article by Christopher Lewis Peterson and Steven Graves. Entitled Usury Law and the Christian Right: Faith Based Political Power and the Geography of the American Payday Loan Regulation, it centers aroung the striking finding that payday loan outlets are most often found in the same places where relative conservative Christians live. Here is part of the abstract:

This Article presents empirical research based on the largest, most comprehensive database of payday loan locations yet created. Payday lender locations are compared to an index measuring the political power of conservative Christian Americans in all fifty states. We conclude that there is a strong correlation between the density of payday lending industry and the political power of conservative Christians, suggesting that conservative Christians have become a prime demographic target of payday lenders. These findings are further discussed in light of Biblical injunctions against usury.

2010 at BYU!

2008-05-01T06:58:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that the 2010 RALS conference will be held at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. BYU has been an active and important part of RALS over the past several years, and will put on a great conference.

The date for the conference has not yet been selected. Building on a great meeting at BC, we are going to try for record numbers at BYU.

-- Mark Osler

Thank you, Boston College!

2008-04-28T07:16:00.000-07:00

The bi-annual RALS conference held this month was a wonderful success, thanks to the ace team at Boston College who hosted the event. The attendees left with a new vigor for our common project.

In the next week, I look forward to announcing here the site for the 2010 meeting.

BC Meeting Coming up soon!

2008-03-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

The RALS conference at Boston College April 6-8 promises to be a great experience. It's not limited to those at Religiously Affiliated Schools, and those from secular schools have registered and attended in the past. All that is required is an interest in the subject matter...

For complete details and registration info, check the BC site here.

What's Shakin' at Univ. of Detroit/Mercy....

2008-02-12T12:12:00.000-08:00

The University of Detroit Mercy School of Law welcomes Dr. Leslie Griffin, Larry and Joanne Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics, University of Houston Law Center to deliver the 10th Annual McElroy Lecture on Law & Religion, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 @ 5:30 PM

No Law Respecting the Practice of Religion

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” What if the drafters used the words “practice of religion” instead of “religion”? How would this change the jurisprudence surrounding this part of our Constitution? Dr. Leslie Griffin, Professor of Law at the University Houston Law Center will address this compelling question, focusing on government funding for religious organizations, public school prayer and free exercise claims. Through this exercise, Dr. Griffin will explore the meaning our courts have given to the term “religion” as they have addressed these critical issues.

For more information please contact Prof. Andrew Moore, (313)596-0220 or mooreaf@udmercy.edu

More Details on the BC Meeting!

2008-02-05T15:04:00.000-08:00

Boston College has announced further details for the April 6-8 meeting of the Religiously Affiliated Law Schools. Check here for information on the event, including registration and lodging info.

Below is the schedule for the conference:

SUNDAY, APRIL 6, 2008

5:00 p.m. Roman Catholic Mass, Trinity Chapel, BC Law School
(for those interested)

6:00 p.m. Opening Reception

7:00 p.m. Dinner

SPEAKER: JOHN GARVEY, DEAN, BOSTON COLLEGE LAW SCHOOL

TABLE DISCUSSION: IDENTIFY 10 THINGS YOU DO DIFFERENTLY AT YOUR LAW SCHOOL BECAUSE YOU ARE A RELIGIOUSLY AFFILIATED INSTITUTION

MONDAY, APRIL 7, 2008

9:00 – 10:15 a.m. TEACHING THROUGH THE LENS OF FAITH: SUCCESSFULLY ENGAGING RELIGIOUS ISSUES IN THE CLASSROOM

• Ladislas Orsy, S.J., Georgetown
• Mark Osler, Baylor
• Chaim Saiman, Villanova
• Amy Uelmen, Fordham

10:15 – 10:45 a.m. Break and informal discussion

10:45 – 12:15 p.m. STUDENT VOCATIONAL DISCERNMENT: SPARKING THE SPIRITUAL, MORAL, AND PROFESSIONAL FORMATION OF YOUNG ADULTS (AND US TOO!)

• Jeff Brauch, Dean, Regent
• R. Michael Cassidy, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Boston College and BC Law School students
• Natt Gant, Regent
• Jerome Organ, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Univ. of St. Thomas (Minneapolis)
• Susan Stabile, Univ. of St. Thomas (Minneapolis)
• Ronald Volkmer, Creighton

12:30 p.m. LUNCH & SPEAKER: CUTBERTO GARZA, PROVOST, BOSTON COLLEGE, GASSON HALL, CHESTNUT HILL CAMPUS

2:30 – 3:45 p.m. HIRING (AND ADMITTING) FOR MISSION: WHAT IT MEANS AND HOW TO DO IT

• Mary Bowman, Seattle Univ.
• Cari Haaland, Director of Admissions, Univ. of St. Thomas (Minneapolis)
• Kenneth Starr, Dean, Pepperdine
• Kevin Worthen, Dean, BYU

TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2008

9:00 – 10:30 a.m. SCHOLARSHIP THROUGH THE LENS OF FAITH: WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE AND WHY DO YOU WANT TO REACH THEM?

• Michael Broyde, Emory
• Vince Rougeau, Notre Dame
• David Skeel, Univ. of Pennsylvania

10:45 – 12:15 p.m. THE CHALLENGE OF INCLUSION: AVOIDING THE US AND THEM

• Sam Levine, Pepperdine
• Lucia Silecchia, Catholic Univ. of America
• Norah Wylie, Dean for Students, Boston College, and BC students

12:30 p.m. CONCLUDING LUNCH

God and Man in Malibu

2008-01-25T11:19:00.000-08:00

Pepperdine has organized a fascinating conference for February 21-22 on the question of "Is there a higher law? Does it matter?" Speakers include (but aren't limited to) Mark Tushnet, Kenneth Elzinga, Steven D. Smith, and Doug Kmiec. For more info, go to Pepperdine's website.

An update on the upcoming RALS conference!

2008-01-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

Boston College, host of this year's meeting of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, now has some info up on their web site here. The conference is slated for April 6-8, which is often a beautiful early-spring week in New England.

An interesting take on pacifism and just war

2007-11-15T15:18:00.001-08:00

I often troll for knowledge and provocation over at the social science research network (www.ssrn.com), and I usually find a fistful of both.

Most recently, I came across a piece written by David B. Kopel, titled "Evolving Christian Attitudes Towards Personal and National National Self-Defense." The full text is available for download here. The passage below is drawn from Kopel's abstract:

In the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, the traditional Christian concepts of Just War and of the individual's duty to use force to defend himself and his family remained uncontroversial, as they had been for centuries. Disillusionment over World War One turned many Catholics and Protestants towards pacifism. Without necessarily adopting pacifism as a theory, they adopted pacifism as a practice. World War Two and the early Cold War ended the pacifist interlude for all but a few radical pacifists.

Beginning in the 1960s, much of the American Catholic leadership, like the leadership of mainline Protestant churches, turned sharply Left. Although churches did not repudiate their teachings on Just War, many Catholic and mainline Protestant leaders seemed unable to find any circumstances under which American or Western force actually was legitimate. Pacifism and anti-Americanism marched hand in hand. Today, pacifism now has greater respectability within orthodox Christianity than any time in the past 1700 years.

Is the hunger there?

2007-10-24T07:48:00.000-07:00

Every year over on my personal blog I solicit suggestions on how we can make Baylor Law a better place. This year, the post yielded up 82 comments from students and former students.

One intriguing part of the process this year was that not one of those comments related to the religious mission of the school.

I don't think the issue is that the students don't care about that part of our mission, which I think is very important. Rather, I suspect that they simply don't see that as an area which urgently needs change one way or the other... or so I hope.

When Justices Go To Church

2007-10-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

I was in Washington for the start of the Supreme Court's term this year, having written one of the briefs in the Kimbrough case. One item on the news the Sunday before the start of arguments was that six of the Justices attended the annual "Red Mass" at the Cathedral of St. Matthew, which is held every year to commemorate the opening of the court. With five Catholic Justices (who were joined at the service by Justice Breyer, who is Jewish), the service seems fitting.

Not all agree, though. In this article, Marci Hamilton at Findlaw argues that "there is good reason to question the judgment of the Justices who attended." In the article, Hamilton seems to link attendance at the service to the outcome in Gonzalez v. Carhart.

Moot Court Competition on Religious Freedom

2007-09-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

In the world of moot court competitions, I can't imagine one more interesting than the National Religious Freedom Moot Court, to be held at George Washington Law School Feb. 22-23, 2008. For more information, check out the web site here.

April in Boston-- The RALS Conference is Coming!

2007-09-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

The dates have been set for the 2008 conference of Religiously Affiliated Schools. The 2008 conference will be hosted by Boston College Law School from Sunday evening, April 6 through midday Tuesday, April 8. The Conference presentations and panels will center on the relationship between religion and a lawyer's professional development; that is, how faith can influence our students' growth as lawyers and our facultys' development as scholars, teachers, and mentors. This two-day event should be of great interest both to faculty and to student service professionals.

I anticipate that this will be the best RALS conference yet.

Good Things Happenin' at Fordham Law

2007-08-20T19:02:00.001-07:00

Among the institutions most actively investigating the connection between faith and legal practice is Fordham Law. Much of these efforts are through Fordham's Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer's Work, which runs programs in a number of areas, both focused on Catholic thought and more broadly addressing interfaith issues.

The Institute's Executive Director, Amy Uelmen, not only heads up these efforts, but publishes some very important work in the field. Her most recent article is Reconciling Evangelization and Dialogue Through Love of Neighbor, 52 Villanova L. Rev. 303 (2007), investigates the tension between evangelizing for a faith and maintaining a warm dialogue with other faiths, always a thorny issue.

Summer Missions

2007-08-03T05:44:00.001-07:00

As I have made my way through the summer, it has occurred to me that I have never heard of a law school working on any sort of a summer mission. It seems like that would be a great project for faculty and students. Though it would have to be short due to the need of students to work in the summer, it might still be worthwhile. Has anyone every tried this? How did it work?

Another Good Read

2007-07-14T06:33:00.000-07:00

One of the most stimulating articles I have read in a while is Ava Maria professor Lee Strang's The Role of the Christian Legal Scholar: The Call for a Modern Saint Benedict, 20 Notre Dame J. of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 59 (2006), which is available here via SSRN. Though it argues from a Christian perspective, many of its points would apply to scholars of other faiths, as well.

Strang argues that Christian legal scholars should have three distinct roles in the modern context-- building Christian law schools, rebuilding Christian law schools, and engaging in larger debates within the society.

Among other things, I find Strang's argument to be a personal challenge to make my own work more relevant and vigorous.

Wow! Now That's a Conference!

2007-06-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

Former Baylor Law Professor Bill Underwood, now the president of Mercer University, has been busy pulling together a blockbuster conference in January/February, 2008 celebrating the New Baptist Covenant. As announced here, the conference will feature (among others):

Charles Adams
Tony Campolo
Jimmy Carter
Bill Clinton
Marian Wright Edelman
Al Gore
Senator Lindsey Graham
Senator Chuck Grassley
Mike Huckabee
Bill Moyers
Julie Pennington-Russell
William Shaw

Notably, this conference brings together black and white Baptist groups as part of the New Baptist Covenant.

Liberty U. Law School in the Trib

2007-05-26T22:03:00.000-07:00

This recent article in the Chicago Tribune about Liberty and other new Christian law schools (quoting Boston College's John Garvey) led to this reaction at the TalkLeft blog.

My own reaction to the controversy (at the Law School Innovation blog) can be found here.

Please feel free to weigh in at any of these sites!

Summer Reading Recommendation

2007-05-17T07:21:00.000-07:00

Harry G. Hutchison at George Mason was kind enough to send me his article just out in the Catholic University Law Review, Shaming Kindergartners? Channelling Dred Scott? Freedom of Expression Rights in Public Schools. At the core of his writing is an important question: "Why has the public square become so secular and so suspicious of religious expression?" In particular, Prof. Hutchison looks at public schools in pursuing this question.

The full cite for the artice is Harry G. Hutchison, Shaming Kindergartners? Channelling Dred Scott? Freedom of Expression Rights in Public Schools, 56 Catholic U. L. Rev. 361 (2007). A downloadable version is also available at SSRN at this link.

Gonzales v. Carhart

2007-04-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

I hope and expect that the Supreme Court's decision on partial-birth abortion (Gonzales v. Carhart) will spur an additional round of serious scholarship on the issue. The press accounts seem pretty shallow, and both sides expect there to be much more litigation as a follow-up to this decision.

Are there any special law review issues focusing on this topic in the works?

A Challenging Review of Christian Legal Scholarship

2007-04-06T09:13:00.001-07:00

Those of you involved in distinctly Christian legal scholarship will want to read David Skeel's working paper entitled "The Unbearable Lightness of Christian Legal Scholarship," available for download at SSRN.

The following is from Skeel's abstract of the paper:

When the ascendency of a new movement leaves a visible mark on American law, its footprints ordinarily can be traced through the pages of America's law reviews. But the influence of evangelicals and other theologically conservative Christians has been quite different. Surveying the law review literature in 1976, the year Newsweek proclaimed as the year of the evangelical, one would not find a single scholarly legal article outlining a Christian perspective on law or any particular legal issue. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, the literature remained remarkably thin. By the 1990s, distinctively Christian scholarship had finally begun to emerge in a few areas. But even today, the scope of Christian legal scholarship is shockingly narrow for such a nationally influential movement.

The weekend dilemma....

2007-03-28T04:59:00.000-07:00

The crew at Boston College is hard at work planning the 2008 RALS conference, which BC will host next Spring. One issue being discussed is that we may avoid having the conference over a weekend, and rather have it Thursday-Friday or Monday-Tuesday. Two primary considerations are that we allow people the family time they count on over the weekend, and that Jewish participants be able to be home on the Sabbath.

New Schools and innovation

2007-03-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

On another blog, I recently suggested an AALS panel on new law schools, in which folks from those new schools could talk about their identities and innovations. Because so many of the newer law schools have a religious identity, I hope that faith issues would be part of the discussion.

Is this a good idea?

Please forward me the news...

2007-02-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

If you have an event upcoming, especially a conference, please email me at Mark_W_Osler@baylor.edu. I hate it when I get one of those folded cards announcing a great conference... three days before it is scheduled to begin.

What about our fellow travelers in secular institutions?

2007-02-21T14:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was in Washington for the arguments in Claiborne and Rita, two sentencing cases before the Supreme Court. Waiting for the session to begin, I fell into conversation with a professor from the University of Virginia Law School. He struck me as a scholar who integrates his faith with his thinking about the law, despite working within a secular institution (UVA).

It would seem that our group has something to offer such fellow-travelers, many of whom might welcome an open discussion of faith issues in a law school context.

The Sacred and The Secular

2007-02-14T21:07:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges of teaching law in a religiously-affiliated school is the inherent tension in providing faith-grounded professional training for a thoroughly secular profession. The courtroom contains a flag, but no cross, star, or crescent, and in nearly all contexts within the practice of law faith issues lie hidden.

Thus, we face a troubling challenge. On the one hand, we can err by conforming to the norm and de-contenting our curriculums of the very mention of faith. On the other, we may err by rooting our practices in an overt faith which will then be banned once our students enter the practice of law.

What we struggle to create is something between these two; competence as a professional within a vocation, consistent with and driven by faith. How do we get there?

If you're in L.A., and free on Friday...

2007-02-11T15:23:00.000-08:00

Dean Kevin Worthen of BYU tipped me off to this conference sponsored by the J. Rueben Clark Society on Friday and Saturday (February 16 & 17) at Pepperdine. It sounds like a great opportunity-- which apparently others have noticed, since 500 participants have already signed up.

Question Two: Should we have a formal membership?

2007-02-08T12:13:00.000-08:00

Up to this point, the Religiously Affiliated Law Schools have put together a conference every other year, with little connected activity between those conferences. There is no formal membership list; those schools with a religious affiliation were simply invited to the conferences. At our last meeting, in 2006 at Baylor, we agreed to a more formal structure, including a standing executive committee.

As we move forward, should we formalize membership in the group?

Question One: Our next meeting...

2007-02-07T13:26:00.000-08:00

As has already been announced, our next meeting will be held in 2008 at Boston College. Are there topics or themes that people would like to explore at that time? Please enter your comments below.