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.

New Schools and innovation

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?

Recommended Reading

The Connecticut Law Review has just published John Breen and Michael Scaperlanda's article, Never Get Out'a The Boat: Stenberg v. Carhart and the Future of American Law (39 Conn. L. Rev. 1). In it, the authors critique the Supreme Court's decision in the 2000 Stenberg case on partial-birth abortion in the context of the cases currently pending before the Court. Interestingly, they do so by using the film Apocalypse Now as a framing tool, lending more depth to their concluding question: "Thus, the Court and the people it serves must decide: Do we turn our backs on civilization and head further into the bush, embracing the illusion of freedom in the barbarous license of state-sanctioned killing?"

Please forward me the news...

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?

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.