Dialogues on Law and Justice

Last year, law professor Richard Garnett of the Notre Dame Law school co-wrote an amicus brief concerning the constitutional issues in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The gist of that brief was published as an article called “Religious Freedom, Church-State Separation, and the Ministerial Exception.” In that paper, Garnett and his co-authors wrote: “It seems to us that because any worthwhile account of religious freedom would...

On January 11th, the United States Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in what many church-state scholars are calling the most important religious freedom case in decades. The case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, highlighted the so-called “ministerial exception,” a concept that has been addressed in lower court First Amendment cases for some time. With a vote of 9-0, the court’s concerns have been stated...

Legal historian John Witte, Jr. discusses why the positivist view of law has become less compelling. Like his mentor, the late Harold Berman, Witte argues that the key to understanding Western law lies in identifying the rich, early Western dialogue between religious and secular institutions; and it requires an understanding of the ways in which legal authority shifted between church and state throughout history. Similarly, Witte argues that because legal jurisdiction in various matters has...

Just before the opening of the new term of the U. S. Supreme Court, the magazine First Things published a summary of the highlights of the 2010 term. The article was called “A Free Speech Year at the Court,” and it was written by Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at the Stanford Law School. On this edition of Dialogues, Professor McConnell talks with host Ken Myers about how the Court is increasingly collapsing all First Amendment freedoms into freedom of speech, a...

At the heart of the question of making laws about marriage is a question of definition. Specifically, is “marriage” a noun describing a mere social convention, or does it label something that is part of the order of reality? Can marriage be whatever we want it to be, or is there something about the nature of human being that defines it rather narrowly? On this issue of Dialogues, Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, says that it’s important to insist...

In 2007, MARS HILL AUDIO produced a special report on ideas about law and justice that informed some of the legal reasoning of the U. S. Supreme Court under the then-newly appointed Chief Justice John Roberts. In September 2011, we launched a series of podcasts that extend that discussion, featuring interviews with legal scholars, philosophers, theologians, historians, and journalists. Each of these podcasts will examine how the making and judging of laws are (or ought to be) guided by...