2011-2012 Year-End Message

Dear Friends:

This academic year has been an exciting one for the Center for Law and Religion (CLR) at St. John's School of Law. We launched a website, hosted an exciting new colloquium, and published a symposium, and our faculty have published articles and participated in conferences around the world. Here are some highlights:

  • CLR launched its new website, CLR Forum, a source for scholars and others interested in law and religion. CLR Forum contains regularly updated information on recent scholarship, cases, and law and religion news from across the globe.
  • CLR hosted an innovative new seminar, the Colloquium in Law: Law and Religion, at St. John's. The seminar, taught jointly by CLR Director Mark L. Movsesian and Assistant Director Marc O. DeGirolami, gave selected St. John's law students an opportunity to study cutting-edge issues in law and religion with some of the most prominent thinkers in the field, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Professors Philip Hamburger (Columbia), Cathleen Kaveny (Notre Dame), Michael McConnell (Stanford), Ayelet Shachar (Toronto) and Joseph Weiler (NYU).
  • CLR published papers from the second annual Religious Legal Theory Conference, which CLR hosted in November 2010, in the St. John's Law Review.
  • CLR faculty made presentations at conferences in the United States and Europe, including the Forum 2000 Conference in Prague, the Oasis Foundation Conference in Venice, the Religious Legal Theory Conference at Pepperdine, and the Annual Law and Religion Roundtable at Northwestern, as well as workshops at Yale, Fordham, the University of St. Thomas and other venues.
  • CLR co-sponsored a conference on religion and bankruptcy with the Center for Bankruptcy Studies at St. John's School of Law and presented a panel on the Hosanna-Tabor case.
  • Movsesian's article, Crosses and Culture: State-Sponsored Religious Displays in the US and Europe, was accepted by the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (forthcoming 2012). His article, The Price of the Ottoman Failure, appeared in a symposium on secularization in the Middle East published by the Oasis Foundation in Venice.
  • DeGirolami's book, Tragedy and History: The Quality of Religious Liberty (forthcoming) was accepted by the Harvard University Press. His article, Against Theories of Punishment: The Thought of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, appeared in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law.

Thank you for being part of the CLR community. We have lots more planned for the coming year, including a conference in Rome, so please continue to follow us on CLR Forum, and please let us know how we're doing and if you have suggestions for future activities.

Best,

Mark L. Movsesian