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

Do Courts Matter?

A Review of The Hollow Hope: Ca Courts Bring About Social Change? by Gerald N. Rosenber

Copyright Protection, the Right to Privacy, and Signals that Enter the Home

The rapid advances in the technology of communication are moving our society ever closer to what scores of futurists have long predicted: A world in which we all sit at home, visiting with one another only through our telecommunication devices. To be sure, that world is still a good way off, but it is unnecessary to keep one\u27s ear to the ground in order to hear the hoofbeats of its advance. The signs of change are all around us, and as the changes come, they continue, as Grant Gilmore once suggested, to unsettle both our law and our selves. The law of intellectual property—a form of law that exists at least in part to govern and encourage technological advance—has been no less unsettled than has any other body of law. Copyright law in particular has turned magnificent analytical somersaults in order to accommodate new forms of expression of ideas. The literature has been full of recommendations for doctrinal change. Yet through it all, the discussion has been analytic and programmatic, asking the ubiquitous question: How can we best . . . ? Far too little attention, however, has been paid to the possibly more important question: Can we at all? Here, as elsewhere in our policy-oriented society, there seems to be a rush to regulate in pursuit of some chimeric public good, with questions of morality and even of constitutionality often postponed