Another Good Read

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!

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

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

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

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

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....

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.