My friend Paul Horwitz has a review up, at the Concurring Opinions blog, of David A. J. Richards’s book, “Fundamentalism in American Religion and Law: Obama’s Challenge to Patriarchy’s Threat to Democracy.” (Interesting title.) Paul opens with this:
When you read the words “This is a provocative book” in a review, you know you’re in the presence of a mixed compliment. On the one hand, the critic will praise the book for saying something new, interesting, and potentially valuable about an important topic. On the other, it signals that the critic thinks there is something deeply flawed, wrong, or misguided about the book, and has reached for polite language to damn it with faint praise.
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Some of you may have seen the article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the job market for law graduates. I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone. The tough job market, of course, is not unique to the legal profession. However, it does raise some difficult moral questions for the enterprise of legal education.
The direct costs of a legal education, for most students without full scholarships, are quite high. The opportunity costs of three years of demanding graduate school also could be quite high, although that is less clear today, when new college graduates also face a devastated entry-level job market. In the past, these costs could be justified because of the possibility of employment in a relatively high-paying corporate law firm. That model is being severly tested by the changes hitting the legal services market as a result of the recession.
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I guess I’m the opposite of many politicians: I favor school choice, yet I send my own kids to the public schools of an urban school district. I like the idea of attending and supporting a neighborhood school, and it helps that our neighborhood school is a good one. But not all parents have the same experience with neighborhood schools, and not all neighborhood schools approach education in a way that reflects the values and priorities of all parents. School choice should be contingent on our commitment to family empowerment, not contingent on charter or private schools having higher test scores than neighborhood schools.
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In a recent NYT column, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/when-is-a-cross-a-cross/?emc=eta1, Stanley Fish attacks Justice Kennedy’s plurality opinion in the recent Mojave cross case as contorted and dishonest. Fish’s criticism is a familiar one, and one that is often justified, in cases in which courts uphold some monument or governmental message that has what from one perspective is plainly religious content: the national motto (“In God We Trust”), the Pledge of Allegiance (“one nation under God”), or, in this case, a cross that serves (for some) as a war memorial. Thecourts sometimes say (as under the “no endorsement” doctrine they must say if the message is to be upheld) that in context the message has somehow lost its religious meaning or content. And this rationale is in turn criticized, first for being dishonest and, second, for being irreverent or sacrilegious. That’s basically what Fish says about Justice Kennedy’s recent opinion.
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I was delighted to receive in the mail the other day my copy of Steven Smith’s latest book, “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse.” Run (or, double-click), don’t walk, to get yours. As one of the back-cover blurb-ers (ahem, me) puts it, “[t]his book presses us to look harder at closely held beliefs and to question [...]
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I hope to find the time later to address the Arizona Immigration Law directly. For now I want use a Chesterton quote to reflect briefly on a potential motivating factors behind the law. To be clear, I think the new Arizona law is terrible and terribly mistaken at many levels. But, I also don’t want to fall into demonizing the common person who supported it.
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I’m pleased to announce the “Faith, Law and Culture Distinguished Speaker Series” to be held at Seton Hall University Law School during the 2010-11 academic year. The goal of this series is to create dialogue between legal scholars and theologians around the theme of “faith, law and culture.” Lectures are free to the public. If you’re a regular reader of the “Law, Religion and Ethics” blog and you can attend one of the lectures, get in touch with me about the after-lecture dinner with the speaker.
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James Davidson Hunter is well known to most of us interested in the intersection of Christianity and culture. His new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World is sure to rock some boats. Here’s a snippet from Chapter Two of the book, in which Hunter lays out what he perceives to be the dominant modes of cultural discourse by contemporary Christianity.
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In a story today, the New York Daily News reported that “a Catholic Nurse” is suing Mount Sinai Medical Center because she was forced to assist in an abortion . . . over her strenuous objections.” Under Section 8-107(3) of the New York City Human Rights Law and Section 296 (10) of the New York State Human Rights Law, this lawsuit should be a slam-dunk. Both of these laws forbid an employer from requiring an employee to violate their religious belief so long as the employer can provide a reasonable accommodation.
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The Supreme Court has been busy addressing issues that have been characterized as pollution yet which were far from the minds of the writers of our standard environmental laws. The Court just granted certiorari in Video Software Dealers Ass’n v. Schwarzenegger, 556 F.3d 950 (9th Cir. 2009), which struck down a California statute regulating the sale of violent video games to minors. Violent entertainment has often been described as cultural pollution, especially in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Duke political scientist James Hamilton’s book “Channeling Violence” presents a sophisticated analysis of violent entertainment as a problem of toxic wastes. Yet the courts have uniformly rejected any effort to regulate such cultural pollution, even as it affects minors.
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