Equality, Social Welfare and Equal Protection

As my contribution to this forum, I thought I would try to make a few tentative distinctions concerning the various tasks judges and commentators seek to assign to the Equal Protection Clause. Approaching it from this perspective spares me the necessity of getting into what one of the earlier speakers described as the more Byzantine details of current equal protection doctrine. Such a discussion would inevitably lead to criticisms of the Judiciary and certain commentators, to comparisons between what some might call the liberal and conservative approaches, and to discussion concerning the needs of a changing and dynamic society. Each of these topics would be an interesting subject in its own right, but I do not think that extended discussion of any or all of them will get us any closer to a clear understanding of what it is that the Equal Protection Clause is supposed to do

ABA and AALS Accreditation: What’s ‘Religious Diversity’ Got To Do With It?

The subject of this essay is whether, and under what circumstances, the religious commitment of an institution should become an issue in the law school accreditation process. Originally presented at the March 1994, Marquette University Conference on Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, this essay begins with the commonly shared assumption that some tensions do exist between religiously affiliated law schools and their accrediting agencies, the American Bar Association (ABA), and the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). For present purposes, the task will be to differentiate those tensions that arise from the accreditation process itself, and those that arise from the religious identity or mission of the institution

Emerging Trends in Religious Liberty

From a religious liberty perspective, the October 2000 term of the United States Supreme Court was relatively uneventful. The Court decided only one case raising significant religious liberty concerns, Good News Club v. Milford Central School. Good News Club adds little to the First Amendment case law already on the books, but it does provide an excellent opportunity to highlight the growing need for well-informed scholars, both American and foreign, to examine the relationships between and among clauses of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States