If you are in New York City, and are reading this blog, here is an event you don't want to miss:
On Friday, March 23, from 9:00-3:00, St. John's University School of Law is hosting a symposium (CLE available!) on "Law and Religion in the Public Square." Noah Feldman is the keynote speaker, and presenters include Chris Eberle, Philip Hamburger, John McGreevy, Kent Greenawalt, Leslie Griffin, and Bernadette Myler. (And me.) Here is the blurb:
OPEN QUESTIONS REMAIN concerning the constitutionality of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, the placement of the national motto “In God We Trust” on currency, the justification for exhibiting the Ten Commandments on state property, the placement of Christmas trees, crèches, nativities and menorahs in public places, the use of government funds for religious education and social services, the equal access of religious groups to public facilities and the ability of private groups to maintain religious autonomy while accessing public funds. How should these issues be resolved?
"My" panel is on "religion and group rights":
Conventionally, the free exercise of religion is thought to protect individuals. Recently, however, courts and commentators have asked anew whether our constitutional commitments also protect the rights of religious institutions or groups. Courts have debated, for instance, the supervision of diocesan finances by a bankruptcy court or administrative agency, the requirement thatreligiously affiliated organizations pay for employees’ contraception and churches’ decisions about the hiring and firing of clergy. Arguing from history and doctrine, panel participants will consider the concept of church autonomy in American law.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Leif Enger's "Peace Like a River" (2001) is a wonderful novel. (I cannot believe it took me so long to read it.) It's a bit of To Kill a Mockingbird, a bit of A Hundred Years of Solitude, a bit of Shoeless Joe, a bit of Flannery O'Connor -- it's got faith, love, pain, laughs, and evil. Run, don't walk (or, click quickly) and get it. (They're making it into a movie; pray they "get it.")
Excellent. I want one.
Of course, these guys have nothing on the Pope Innocent III action figure.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
A great book for understanding our laws and political institutions is Harold Berman's Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Here is a nice review, by Victor Muniz-Fraticelli, of Berman's follow-up, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition. Here is a bit:
Harold Berman made a significant mark in legal historiography with the first volume of Law and Revolution (hereafter LR1). In it, he challenged the standard periodization of Western history, which held that "modernity" began in the sixteenth century and that it was preceded by a long, undistinguished, and largely undifferentiated "middle age" throughout which not much of consequence occurred (LR1, p. 14). Such periodization reflected the historians' disregard for law "as an independent factor, one of the causes, and not only one of the results, of social, economic, political, intellectual, moral, and religious developments." (LR1, p. 44) To focus on the history of the Western legal tradition, Berman argued, would show that the first modern Western legal system can be traced to the end of the eleventh century. Hildebrand's revolutionary assertion of ecclesiastical independence from imperial authority in 1075 helped establish in the Roman Catholic Church a jurisdiction separate and parallel to the many secular jurisdictions of the day (LR1, p. 107ff). This newfound independence coincided with the discovery of the Emperor Justinian's compilations of the law of the Roman Empire, and their methodical study in European universities. Over the next two centuries, under the influence of Papal authority and scholarly method, the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church was systematized and transformed into the first modern legal system (LR1, p. 120-23, 253-54). By the same token, secular authorities were stripped of spiritual power and constrained to the functions of government familiar to us today: "the maintenance of peace and the establishment of justice in [the] realm" (LR1, p. 534). The Western legal tradition was born out of the plurality of jurisdictions—and, in particular, the competition between the ecclesiastical and the secular legal systems—that characterized the later part of the Middle Ages (LR1, pp. 273ff, 531ff).
If LR1 is the tale of the triumph of the Papal Revolution, Law and Revolution II (hereafter LR2) is the tale of its demise. (LR2, p. 39) The Papal Revolution had divided the spiritual jurisdiction from the secular and allowed them both to coexist; the Protestant Reformations abolished the ecclesiastical jurisdiction altogether and put many areas of spiritual law—church liturgy, marriage, schooling, moral discipline, and poor relief—back in secular hands (LR2, p. 179). The result was a dramatic transformation of the Western legal tradition. Some have characterized it as a secularization of spiritual realm, but, as Berman notes, it was simultaneously a spiritualization of the secular (LR2, p. 64).
Thursday, March 15, 2007
The term "death-row volunteer" probably sounds strange -- do people really "volunteer" to be on death-row? -- but, nonetheless, it describes reasonably accurately a not-insubstantial number of those convicted murderers who have been executed in the United States since 1976. (For more detail on the death-row-volunteer issue, see this paper of mine from a few years ago.)
Today, the indefatigable Howard Bashman reports, the en banc United States Court of Appeals ruled that Robert Charles Comer, who was sentenced to death in Arizona, was "competent" to waive further proceedings relating to his federal habeas corpus petition and that he had, in fact, "voluntarily" waived those proceedings. In a nutshell, the Ninth Circuit ruled that, notwithstanding the possibility that legal errors had infected his capital-sentencing proceedings, Comer could prevent judicial correction of those errors by "volunteering" to be executed, in accord with his death sentence. (The court rejected the argument, advanced by Comer's counsel -- who were arguing, obviously, against Comer's stated wish to volunteer -- that Comer's "volunteering" was the product of harsh prison conditions.)
What should we think about this case? How should we think about death-row volunteers generally?
Continue reading
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
As we all know, the Liberation Theology movement -- or, some strands of the movement -- prompted some responses and corrections from the Magisterium. I'm curious, though -- does anyone know of (or can anyone tell me where to look for) particular legal reforms that were put into place as a result of the witness and challenge of Liberation Theologians?
