The Structure of the Religious Liberty Guarantee
I met John Noonan in the office of the late David W. Louisell in January, 1974, and remember to this day just how awestruck I was at being in the company of such great scholars. I find myself even more humbled as I pen this essay in honor of the birthday of my esteemed teacher, advisor, and friend. To be invited to join the festschrift is an extraordinary honor for a former student but it is also an immense challenge. The task of writing a coherent essay for one's professor usually ends upon graduation from law school. To write one in honor of a professor (and a favorite one at that) is an altogether new experience. Because I write to pay tribute to a man whose manner of thinking has indelibly shaped the manner in which I teach my own students, my goal is to write an essay that builds upon the work he has done in the field of law and religion. And if, in the final analysis, it meets that standard, it will do so, in part, because of John Noonan's efforts as a teacher, scholar and role model.
Religion and Liberal Democracy
It has been a while since Catholics were tarred and feathered or Mormons dispatched by militias and mobs on forced marches to Utah. True, hostility to minority religions has not disappeared entirely: Reverend Sun Myung Moon did time in federal prison for tax crimes, Shree Bhagwan Rashneesh left the country one step ahead of the law, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness lies largely bankrupt, to name a few examples. But contemporary claims of religious oppression -are typically subtler than claims of outright persecution. For example, Professor Michael McConnell, my opponent in this debate, laments what he depicts as a relentless pattern of "secularization" in which "serious religion-religion understood as more than ceremony, as the guiding principle of life"-has been "shoved to the margins of public life."' This secularization, he suggests, is a result of the increasing displacement of religious functions by an expanding welfare state, coupled with two kinds of error by the Supreme Court: (1) it has granted too few religious exemptions from public laws under the Free Exercise Clause; and (2) it has too often excluded religion from public programs in the name of preventing establishment. Professor McConnell would read both Religion Clauses as requiring government to respect a single "baseline": "the hypothetical world in which individuals make decisions about religion on the basis of their own religious conscience, without the influence of government."2 On this view, the Court should mandate more exemptions and find fewer establishments in order to maintain religious pluralism. I disagree with both the diagnosis and the cure. To begin, I find any picture of rampant secularization difficult to square with numerous indicators of religion's lively role in contemporary Amer-
Papacy and Law in the Gregorian Revolution: The Canonistic Work of Anselm of Lucca
PART I: PAPACY AND LAW ON THE EVE OF THE GREGORIAN REVOLUTION PART II: A CANONIST IN THE AGE OF REFORM