University of St. Thomas

Thomas Berg grew up in Chicago and received a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University, an M.A. in philosophy and politics from Oxford University, and both an M.A. in religious studies and a J.D. from the University of Chicago, all with honors. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. While in law school, Berg served as executive editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and won the Beale and Bustin prizes for legal writing and student scholarship. He also served as musical director for three law school student musical comedy shows.

After clerking for Judge Alvin Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Berg practiced law in Chicago with Mayer, Brown and Platt. In addition to handling general commercial litigation, Berg specialized in writing briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals, and also handled a range of legal matters for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and other religious institutions.

Before joining the St. Thomas faculty, Berg taught for 10 years at Samford University’s Cumberland Law School. In addition to teaching constitutional law, law and religion, intellectual property, civil procedure, and federal courts, Berg has established himself as one of the leading scholars of law and religion in the United States. He has written approximately 60 articles in law reviews and religion journals on religious freedom, constitutional law, and the role of religion in law, politics and society. Berg is the author of The State and Religion in a Nutshell (now in a second edition), part of West Publishing Company's leading series of law books; and he is co-author with Michael McConnell and John Garvey of Religion and the Constitution, a casebook published by Aspen Publishing (second edition forthcoming). Berg is also working on Diversity and Devotion, a legal and cultural history of American church-state relations since World War II.

At St. Thomas, Berg is co-director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy and served for two years as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. He has written more than 25 briefs on issues of religious liberty and free speech in the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts and has often testified to Congress in support of legislation protecting religious freedom. For this work, he received the Religious Liberty Defender of the Year Award from the Christian Legal Society in 1996. He has also received the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award (2004) from the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, for the Religion and the Constitution casebook, and the John Courtney Murray Award from DePaul University College of Law for scholarly and other contributions to church-state studies.

Berg has also been a visiting professor at the University of Aix-Marseille in Aix-en-Provence, France, and the University of Siena in Italy.  He has made numerous presentations to academic, professional, religious, and community groups, including the annual conventions of the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools. He is a regular contributor to Mirror of Justice, a weblog on Catholic legal theory. He is past chair of the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools and a member of advisory committees for the National Council of Churches, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the DePaul University Center for Church-State Studies, and the Democrats for Life of Minnesota. He is also a member of the European-American Consortium on Church-State Relations, and an associate of the Crossroads Center for Faith and Public Policy.

Courses Taught:

Constitutional Law
Federal Courts
First Amendment: Religious Liberty
Intellectual Property
Law and Religion: Christianity and Politics

Mailing Address:

MSL 400
1000 LaSalle Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403-2015