This is a brief preface to the Spanish translation of our volume, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (4th ed. 2016). Presented below in both English and Spanish, the preface describes briefly the American story of religious liberty from its colonial beginnings to the latest Supreme Court cases arising under the First Amendment and…[Read more]

Max Weber traced the rise of the modern economy back to the convergence of new Protestant teachings on vocation, predestination, and asceticism. It was especially the marital household, this Article argues, that served as an incubator of these Protestant teachings and a laboratory for their application to economic activity. The early modern…[Read more]

This Article analyzes the major United States Supreme Court cases on the role of religion in public schools, the role of government in religious schools, and the place of religious rights of students and parents in all schools. It shows how the Court’s religion cases have vacillated between principles of strict separation of church and state and a…[Read more]

This review essay evaluates Kathleen Brady’s provocative and original defense of the idea that religion remains special in modern liberal democracies, and deserves special constitutional treatment. While warmly commending this work, this essay also queries the author’s non-originalist reading of original sources, her non-theological account of rel…[Read more]

This Article analyzes John Calvin’s reformation of Western family law in sixteenth century-Geneva. Calvin depicted marriage as a sacred and presumptively enduring union, but also a conditional and breakable covenant with distinct and discernible goods and goals that couples and communities alike had to support. This covenantal framework gave C…[Read more]

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation revolutionized not only theology and the church, but also law and the state. This northern European reform movement, though divided into Lutheran, Anabaptist, Anglican, and Calvinist branches, collectively broke the international rule of the medieval Catholic Church and its canon law, and permanently…[Read more]

This is a brief report on an international conference on the contested place of religious freedom in the United States and the United Kingdom, offering legal, historical, and comparative perspectives.

Historically, sexual morality and criminal law overlapped, and churches and states enforced sundry sex crimes. Today, new constitutional liberties and new reforms to family law and criminal law have dramatically reduced the roll of sex crimes and the roles of churches in maintaining sexuality morality. But sexual misconduct remains a perennial…[Read more]

French-born Protestant Reformer, John Calvin, led a sweeping reformation of law, politics, and society in sixteenth-century Geneva. Building on classical and earlier Christian sources, Calvin developed an innovative and integrative theory of rights and liberties, church and state, authority and power, natural law and positive law. Particular…[Read more]

This editorial prefaces the contents of the December 2018 volume of the Journal of Law and Religion. These remarks comment briefly on the growing field of inquiry located at the intersection of law and religion before introducing the diverse range of provocative topics addressed by the articles and reviews included in this issue, with…[Read more]

The Lutheran reformation transformed not only theology and the church but law and the state as well. Beginning in the 1520s, Luther joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of church, state, and society on the strength of Luther’s new theology. These legal reforms were defined and defended in hundreds o…[Read more]