God and Man in Malibu

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!

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

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?

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

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

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!

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.