Religious Freedom as if Religion Matters: A Tribute to Justice Brennan

On April 22, 1998, Professor of Law, Stephen L. Carter of Yale Law School, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s eighteenth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: Religion-Centered Free Exercise: A Tribute to Justice Brennan. Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. Among his courses are law and religion, the ethics of war, contracts, evidence, and professional responsibility. His most recent book is The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama (2011). Among his other books on law and politics are God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics; Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy; The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty; The Confirmation Mess: Cleaning up the Federal Appointments Process; and The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and PoliticsTrivialize Religious Devotion. Professor Carter writes a column for Bloomberg View and is a regular contributor to Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He blogs about professional football for the Washington Post. Professor Carter also writes fiction. His novel The Emperor of Ocean Park spent eleven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. His next novel, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, will be published in 2012. His novella “The Hereditary Thurifer” recently appeared in the crime anthology, The Dark End of the Street. Professor Carter was formerly a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, as well as for Judge Spottswood W. Robinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, and has received eight honorary degrees

Evolutionism, Creationism, and Treating Religion As a Hobby

Contemporary liberalism faces no greater dilemma than deciding how to deal with the resurgence of religious belief. On the one hand, liberals cherish religion, as they cherish all matters of private conscience, and liberal theory holds that the state should do nothing to discourage free religious choice. At the same time, contemporary liberals are coming to view any religious element in public moral discourse as a tool of the radical right for the reshaping of American society, and that reshaping is something liberals want very much to discourage. In truth, liberal politics has always been uncomfortable with religious fervor. If liberals cheered the clerics who marched against segregation and the Vietnam War, it was only because the causes were considered just—not because the clerics were devout. Nowadays, people who bring religion into the making of public policy come more frequently from the right, and the liberal response all too often is to dismiss them as fanatics. Even the religious left is sometimes offended by the mainstream liberal tendency to mock religious belief. Not long ago, the magazine Sojourners—published by politically liberal Christian evangelicals—found itself in the unaccustomed position of defending the evangelist Pat Robertson against secular liberals who, the magazine sighed, see[m] to consider Robertson a dangerous Neanderthal because he happens to believe that God can heal diseases. \u27 The point is that the editors of Sojourners, who are no great admirers of the Reverend Robertson, also believe that God can cure disease. So do tens of millions of Americans. Conservativism, with its deep emphasis on the immutability of certain traditional values, is relatively comfortable with the idea that the values it preserves may have a source beyond the arbitrary moral judgments of fallible humanity. Liberalism, steeped as it is in skepticism, rationalism and tolerance, unfortunately has little idea of how to cope with the millions of people who embrace so absurd a notion. The answer up to now has been to repeat, like a catechism, the language of the Supreme Court in School District of Abington Township v. Schempp: the command of the First Amendment [is] that the Government maintain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion

Business begins at home

One of the most significant trends in the post-industrial era has been for the home to become an important focus for work. The boundaries between work and home are now increasingly blurred, reversing the forces of the industrial era in which places deemed suitable for each were clearly demarcated and physically separate. The most recent published figures available from the Labour Force Survey (2005)1 indicate that 3.1m people now work mainly from home, 11% of the workforce. This represents a rise from 2.3m in 1997 (9% of the workforce), a 35% increase. The majority of homeworkers (2.4m or 77% of the total) are 'teleworkers' – people who use computers and telecommunications to work at home. The number of teleworkers has increased by 1.5m between 1997 and 2005, a 166% increase. Clearly, it is the growth in the number of teleworkers which is driving the increase in homeworking

Restricted access : women's business ownership in profile

This report presents a profile of women-owned businesses in the United Kingdom. The data is drawn from a survey undertaken by the University of Strathclyde for the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), published in May 2002. In total, 18,561 FSB members responded to the survey, of whom 1,750 (9%) stated that their business was wholly female-owned. In comparison, nearly 44% of respondents stated that their business was wholly male-owned and 42% that their business was owned jointly by men and women. Women-owned businesses are an important element of the SME sector and, as this profile shows, the characteristics of their businesses are rather different to the majority

Risk Rationing and Activity Choice in Moral Hazard Constrained Credit Markets

This paper explores the productivity and income distribution e.ects of asymmetric information and risk preferences on the credit market. A model of contract design in the presence of moral hazard is developed in which competitive, risk neutral lenders o.er contracts to risk averse agents who hold the option to invest capital and labor time in an entrepreneurial activity. The model gives rise to the potential for quantity rationing and an additional form of non-price rationing called risk rationing. Both quantity and risk rationed agents would seek credit and carry out the entrepreneurial activity in a first best, or symmetric information world. When information is asymmetric, the menu of available loan contracts shrinks. In equilibrium, neither type of agent ends up with a loan contract, and both undertake a safe, but low return wage labor activity. Quantity rationed agents are involuntarily excluded from the entrepreneurial activity because they are denied any loan contract. Risk rationed agents voluntarily retreat from the credit market and the entrepreneurial activity rather than choose among the limited set of high risk contracts available to them in the presence of asymmetric information. Analysis shows that both quantity and risk rationing are likely to be wealth-biased, inhibiting the activity choice and the income earning potential of low wealth agents, and reproducing initial inequality.

Underwriting area-based yield insurance to crowd-in credit supply and demand

Recent theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that risk (especially covariant risk that is correlated across producers) may discourage both the supply of agricultural credit and the willingness of small holders to utilize available credit and enjoy the higher expected incomes credit could make available to them. One possible resolution to this problem is to remove risk from the system by independently insuring it. However, conventional (all hazard) crop insurance has in almost every instance been rendered financially unsustainable by moral hazard and adverse selection problems. This paper instead analyzes two index-based insurance schemes, one based on a weather index, and a second based on measured average yields. While these index insurance products do not protect the farmer from all risks, our econometric analysis (which is based on data from the north coast of Peru) shows that they could have substantial value to the producer and could also crowd-in credit supply from lenders reluctant to carry too much covariant risk in their loan portfolios. We also show that insurance based on measured yields is markedly superior to a weather index (for both borrowers and lenders). We close by arguing that present and past public good failures justify public intervention in this area, and analyze the feasibility of a public scheme to initially underwrite the costs and uncertainties associated with area-based yield insurance

2021 Judge Horace J. Johnson, Jr. Lecture on Race, Law and Policy with Stephen Carter

Yale Law School\u27s Cromwell Professor Stephen Carter served as the inaugural Judge Horace J. Johnson, Jr. Lecturer on Race, Law and Policy Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1982. He is the author of 15 books, as well as six novels, including The Emperor of Ocean Park, which spent 11 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, a fictional account of a trial of Lincoln in the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors. Carter is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall at the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Spottswood W. Robinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Among the accolades Carter\u27s work has received are the Louisville-Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction and the Paul M. Bator Award. He has also served on the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury. With support from UGA\u27s Presidential Task Force on Race, Ethnicity and Community, the School of Law and School of Public and International Affairs have established the Judge Horace J. Johnson, Jr. Lecture on Race, Law and Policy in honor of the late jurist, who was a trailblazer for the Black community in Georgia. Johnson was a pioneer throughout his life. He was one of five students who helped desegregate Newton County, Georgia, schools in the 1960s. He graduated from the UGA School of Law in 1982. After briefly working in Atlanta, Johnson became the first Black attorney to practice in his home county. In 2002, he became the first Black Superior Court judge to serve in the Alcovy Judicial Circuit when then-Gov. Roy Barnes appointed him to the post. He remained in this role until his death in July 2020

Is Christ the Son in the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen

Is Christ the son in the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen? The Church would consider this question a valid one during any period of her history, because she has always associated the interpretation of parables with the content of her faith. But a question of this nature demands more careful consideration in the age of Biblical criticism, because it must be considered from several viewpoints. One hundred and fifty years ago, our question could have been viewed from this perspective: Did Jesus refer to Himself as the son in the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen as it is recorded in Holy Scriptures? Today, on the basis of Synoptic studies and research on the parables, we must look at this question from at least four perspectives:1. How does the writer of Matthew interpret the son in this parable? 2. How does Mark interpret the son? 3. How does Luke interpret the son? 4. What did Jesus intend when He originally told the parable to a Palestinian audience? In order to answer the original question, it is2essential to understand the parable as a literary form, and it is also necessary to understand the interpretations of the authors of individual Synoptic Gospels and the needs of the early Christian community to which they addressed themselves