RALS At The AALS!

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

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?

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

The Charge and Embrace of Discrimination

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

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

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

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.