In the medieval university, disputatio was the formal process of debate and discussion of arguments and ideas. It was the art of disputing, a kind of intellectual joust, and meant to discover the truth of the matter in question.
I have a new paper with this title. It argues that we have neglected the issue of essences in some of our fundamental legal concepts, with the result that our concepts are no longer cohering and can no longer serve the functions that we are asking of them. I focus on the concepts of “person” […]
Kevin and I were delighted to speak with our old friend, Professor Lee Strang, about the arrival of civic and/or classical education centers in universities. Lee is Professor of Law at The Ohio State University School of Law and the Executive Director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. We discussed […]
Kevin and I interview Professor Nathan Chapman, co-author with Professor Michael McConnell of an important recent book on the Establishment Clause, Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience. Among other issues we discuss are the authors’ view that the Clause exists to protect against government “conformity” in matters […]
Kevin and I have this interview with our old friend, Professor Steven D. Smith, about his new book, The Godless Constitution and the Providential Republic. In it we discuss the nature of Providence in the American political self-understanding and what happened to it across the centuries, together with reflecting on some lasting themes from Steve’s […]
Delighted to share that Ryan Hanlon (of the National Council for Adoption, and Adjunct Professor in CUA’s National Catholics School of Social Services) and I have published an article in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy entitled, “Informing Choice: The Role of Adoption in Women’s Pregnancy Decision-Making.” In this article, we describe […]
Kevin and I offer some guarded reactions to, and some explanation of some of the issues in, today’s big decisions concerning universal injunctions, the separation of powers, free speech, and free exercise. Listen in!
An essay of mine on the ascendancy of religious exemption in our world and exemption’s relationship with what I call “establishment” and “disestablishment” (hint: it’s not really about “religion,” whatever that means). A bit from the beginning, which fortuitously uses some barbecue metaphors in honor of Independence Day: What can the minority in a democracy […]
I was delighted to speak with Anton Sorkin, Director: Law Student Ministries at the Christian Legal Society and Affiliate Professor at Trinity Law School, about several things in his podcast, “Cross & Gavel”: my own background and how I got interested in law and religion as a field, as well as the past, present, and […]
It was a great honor and pleasure for Kevin and me to host my friend and former colleague, Professor Mark Movsesian of St. John’s Law School. In this episode of Sub Deo, we discuss some of the most contentious and emotionally fraught cases in the law and religion canon–the wedding-vendor cases–pitting the rights of the […]
That’s by and large the subject of our discussion on this new podcast, as Kevin and I chatted about some comments he will offer in response to Jonathan Gienapp’s “Against Constitutional Originalism” at a conference at Yale. It gave us a chance to revisit one of my favorite old cases, Calder v. Bull (1798), and […]
