The year 2023 is an end and a beginning for the field of law and religion. It saw the passing of Professor Kent Greenawalt and Professor Steven Shiffrin. It witnessed the retirement of Professor Douglas Laycock, Professor Steven Smith, and Professor Gerard Bradley. All were and are giants in law and religion. In this talk, Professor DeGirolami discusses the history of the field in the U.S. and the questions that motivated it to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. These include the nature of religion and the secular in the law, the division between these concepts, and the implications for law and religion as an independent academic discipline; the concept of state neutrality as to religion and the connected public-private divide as respects what is religious and what is non-religiously political; and the regime of religious exemption for everyone with a sincere objection to a law as the central feature of religious free exercise. Yet for both conceptual and practical reasons, these are now, or will soon become, dead issues.

CLE

1.0 CLE credit has been approved.  The CLE event code is 493073 and on-demand code is 496697.

Speaker

Marc O. DeGirolami is the Cary Fields Professor of Law and the Co-Director of the Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law. His publications include The Tragedy of Religious Freedom (Harvard University Press) and past and future articles in the Yale Law Journal, Notre Dame Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, Legal Theory, and the Boston College Law Review, among others. He has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, First Things, Commonweal, and The Library of Law and Liberty. His current book project on traditionalism in constitutional interpretation is under contract with Cambridge University Press.