Legal Commentary

Rick mentioned the first Annual Law and Religion Roundtable the other day.  It finished up on Friday, and was a fantastic two-day event.  I was a co-organizer, but most of the hard work was done by Nelson Tebbe of Brooklyn Law School and Rick himself.  There seems to be a lot of important and valuable work going on in law and religion these days, and in particular I hope folks are putting pennies away in their piggy jars or hoarding their PDFs, because it looks as if a lot of very interesting books about law and religion should be coming out in the next two years -- not only books in the works by various participants in the roundtable, but also books by others who couldn't attend.  Some seek to revive or reexamine standard values that have been used in this area, such as neutrality, while others take a more jurisdictional or institutional approach to law and religion issues; still others have a distinctly "tragic" sense of the conflicts posed by law and religion issues in liberal democracies.  I learned a great deal from all of them, and from the many articles and essays that the participants workshopped and the comments on them.  I was especially grateful for the tough but supportive comments on my own work.

My real reason for writing this, though, is less to recap the event than to praise Brooklyn Law School and its dean, Joan Wexler, for hosting it.  BLS is a lovely place, the facilities were top-notch, and everything ran very smoothly.  Thanks to all, and especially to BLS, for a great event.