Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Publication Information
70 Am. J. Juris. 71 (2025).
Abstract
This paper provides an overview and appreciation of Prof. Gerard V. Bradley’s scholarly contributions to the American constitutional law of church and state. The Supreme Court of the United States has, in recent years, handed down a number of closely watched and much-remarked-on rulings in cases involving the First Amendment’s Religion Clause and various religion-related statutes. The Court has moved the law of religious freedom and church–state relations toward coherence and clarity, and better aligned it with American history, tradition, and practice, and with an appropriate understanding of judges’ capacities and of the judicial role in a democracy. It appears to be abandoning what Gerard Bradley recently and aptly called its “secularist misadventure.” Rather than requiring, in Bradley’s words, the “relegation and isolation of religion,” the Justices now appreciate that the First Amendment was originally, and should now be, understood as protecting a liberty of conscience and requiring of governments a benevolent neutrality among religious communities and traditions, a requirement that is not inconsistent with public efforts to recognize and support the good of religion.
Recommended Citation
Richard W. Garnett,
Gerard V. Bradley and the American Law of Church and State,
70 Am. J. Juris. 71 (2025)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1883
Comments
This paper is based on a presentation given at a conference in honor of Prof. Gerard V. Bradley, at the University of Notre Dame, on August 29–30, 2024.