Francis Bacon Takes on the Ghouls: The "First Principles" of Religious Freedom

Authors

Richard W. Garnett, Notre Dame Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

2000

Publication Information

3 Green Bag 2d 447 (2000) (book review).

Abstract

John Witte, Jr.
Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment:
Essential Rights and Liberties
Westview Press 2000

From the Review

This is a great time for students of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses and of what Professor John Witte calls the American "experiment" with religious freedom. We've been blessed these past few years with an in-print seminar - an upper-division offering, team-taught by faculty heavyweights - on this experiment, its products and prospects, and the values that have shaped it. Our teachers and texts have included, to name just a few, Professor Steven Smith's Foreordained Failure: The Constitutional Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom (1995); Dean John Garvey's What Are Freedoms For? (1996); Judge John Noonan's The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (1998); and now Professor Witte's Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties (2000). And though each of these texts, standing alone, is an achievement and an education, each is perhaps best read as one interlocutor's contribution to our lively seminar discussion on the meaning, purpose, and even the existence of the First Amendment's "first principles."

Recommended Citation

Richard W. Garnett, Francis Bacon Takes on the Ghouls: The "First Principles" of Religious Freedom, 3 Green Bag 2d 447 (2000) (book review)..
Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1880