I promise that not all of my posts will be this self serving, but I am pleased to report that I just received the first copy of my new book, “Law’s Environment: How the Law Shapes the Places We Live.” Yale describes it as follows:
John Copeland Nagle shows how our reliance on environmental law affects the natural environment through an examination of five diverse places in the American landscape: Alaska’s Adak Island; the Susquehanna River; Colton in California’s Inland Empire; Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the badlands of North Dakota; and Alamogordo in New Mexico. Nagle asks why some places are preserved by the law while others are not, and he finds that environmental laws often have unexpected results while other laws have surprising effects on the environment. Nagle argues that sound environmental policy requires better coordination among the many laws, regulations, and social norms that determine the values and uses of our scarce lands and waters.
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I do not know if there are any representatives of the Puritan tradition on this blog, but I may self-classify as one given my complaint in this post. I object to Vice President Biden’s choice of words in describing health care reform to President Obama. I object to Vice President Cheney’s choice of similar words on various occasions. I object to the fact that virtually no one seems to object anymore when a political leader chooses these words. I think that there is a real cost (though not a measurable cost, I confess) to a civilized society when we lose the ability to deem certain words so crude as to be beyond the pale of acceptable discourse.
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Thanks to the hard work of editor Leslie Griffin, Law & Religion (Aspen Publishers) is now in print. The textbook gives the “backstory” on some of the classic First Amendment cases, from Malnak v. Yogi to Goldman v. Weinberger, Lynch, Edwards, and several others. There is nothing like the real story of a case (and a close examination of court decisions at all levels) to remind all who tend the constitutional garden how complicated and fraught are the controversies that give rise to our abstract discussions about the “right rule” for Establishment or Free Exercise cases. They raise theological questions, sociological questions, and sometimes even questions like “what were these people thinking?” Almost always I am struck by the question of whether the courts are a fruitful way of resolving church-state controversies, and whether our divided communities use them, as they should, as a last resort when all dialogue fails and other options are exhausted. In any case, if nothing else, these stories seem to confirm the Psalmist’s view that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
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“Freedom to contract” is one of the pillars of libertarian economic theory (the other being “protection of private property rights”). The principle of freedom to contract suggests that government should avoid regulating private transactions because the individual parties to contractual agreements are in the best position to judge the value of their bargain and possess the moral freedom to make their own bargains.
Many conservative Christians take an essentially libertarian approach to freedom of contract. For example, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a think-tank with strong Catholic ties, states on its website that “[p]rivate property and the freedom to contract are fundamental human rights, as each person is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor.” Theological grounds for this perspective include the inherent worth of the individual as created in the image of God, and the sinful tendency of people with governmental power to abuse that power.
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Here is a great riff by that consummate theologian, Stephen Colbert, on Glenn Beck’s admonition that Christians should avoid churches that emphasize “social justice.”
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I’m blogging about education on a law/religion/ethics blog, and I used to teach high school history, economics and government. So I feel more or less obligated to say something about the latest culture war flare up over social studies curriculum standards in Texas.
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“An unjust law is not law.” So declares a classic natural law principle. People have debated whether the principle is correct, what it entails, when it applies. The most obvious application, probably, is to laws that are unjust in their substance– laws, for example, that authorize the taking of innocent life. But might the principle also apply to laws that come into being through an unjust process?
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I am in the midst of editing a book of some of Louis Brandeis’s unpublished lectures and I am struck by how similar the issues that confronted him are to the issues that we confront. Brandeis might have much to say this week, as the Senate Banking Committee is on the verge of approving a bill that would establish a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the House prepares to vote on a health care proposal that may be posted on the internet at any moment. My guess is that Brandeis’s answers to these problems would be unlike either what we hear today from the left or the right.
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How does our conception of sin matter to our understanding of faith? What changes about our relationship with God and neighbor if we conceive of sin as a debt rather than a weight? And do these conceptions have an impact on the temporal order — e.g., do our changing conceptions of sin shape our conceptions of justice or retribution? Notre Dame professor Gary Anderson tackles the first two questions, but I’m guessing he leaves the second question open for LR & E bloggers to explore. Anderson has written a fascinating new book, The Evolution of Sin, in which he traces the changing metaphors used to capture the essence of sin in the New Testament and Hebrew Bible.
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I’m just finishing the Chronicles of Narnia with my youngest daughters, and I always find it to be a wonderful reaffirmation of my faith. The Christian faith resonates most powerfully with me as an overarching narrative capturing the reality of the human condition and the hope of redemption; it’s when I focus on the tenets of faith only as freestanding bits and pieces that I start to struggle. The fact that the narrative unfolds among talking beasts in another world only underscores its timelessness and universality. But that’s a very Christian way of looking at faith, I realize. Michael Weingrad, in the Jewish Review of Books, asks why fantasy doesn’t play a meaningful role in Judaism.
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