The following comes from a January 10 story on the Christian Post website.
Stanford Law School has established the nation’s only religious liberty clinic, enabling students under the professor’s supervision to represent clients who are fighting legal battles on the grounds of religious freedom.
The clinic will offer participating law students the opportunity to engage in disputes arising from a wide range of religious beliefs, practices, and customs, the school announced this week.
“Part of what we are trying to do is show our students and our community how religious liberty is a natural right that is for all of us and that all too often religious liberty disputes are really debates about the merits of the particular religious practice involved rather than the liberty,” the clinic’s founding director, James Sonne, told the Christian Post on Wednesday. “We want to show that this is something for everybody regardless of your religious background and practice.”
Sonne, who is an expert in the area of religious liberty through his professional and academic experience, said Stanford Law School is a pioneer in political and legal education. The school was looking to expand its existing clinic programs that give law students the opportunity to handle real cases under his and his staff’s supervision.
The clinic was made possible, in part, by a $1.6 million gift from the Washington, D.C.-based Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The program will be housed within Stanford’s Mills Legal Clinic….
To read entire story, click here.
Wonderful. It’s a needed service. Let’s hope this doesn’t encourage the Wiccans, Muslims and Satanists to demand their religious rights, as has happened in some state prisons.
May Stanford University be richly rewarded.
Wow — Standford Law actually appearing to look fairly and objectively at legal issues surrounding religious suppression. Revolutionary! Next, Wisconsin Law will actually appear to look at First Amendment issues in an objective manner under the constitution. This bears close monitoring, as it could become a laboratory to concoct issues to confound the exercise of religious freedom. Satan is beyond intelligent, so skepticism, and prayer, are in order. Still, this is encouraging.
Very good news, and rather amazing.
In the bad old days :( (which some here keeping referring to as the “good old days”), Catholics were not even permitted to celebrate Mass on campus, so some rich family gave a ranch style home in Palo Alto which became the Newman Center and St. Anne’s Chapel.
Now Stanford is having a group to DEFEND religious liberty. Yay.
Early in my career, I worked at Stanford University for the staff counsel, meaning their attorney on staff, who was himself a Stanford graduate himself and spent some hours in the Stanford University Law Library, sometimes down in the basement, where records are stored going all the way back to the founding of the university in the late 1800’s. My Uncle Carl was a Stanford University professor, a great-uncle was in the first graduating class, and my boyfriend was a Stanford professor as well. Stanford Law School has an extremely proud history and is fully able to live up to the stated purposes of this gift. Do bear in mind that religious liberty in America was intended to ensure “liberty and justice for all” our fellow Americans, not just for those of us blessed to be Catholics living under the laws of this great nation, and that Stanford Law School will be teaching law, not Catholicism. You may not always like the religion Stanford graduates of this program will be working to protect under the law. If you study the history of freedom of religion in the United States, you will be pleased to know that Catholics in America have truly needed the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and have ultimately benefitted therefrom, as have other Americans.
Are you saying, Maryanne, that Stanford Law is better able to remain ethical than Church officials?
One can’t help but wonder how much the proposed Obamanation anti-freedom of religion mandates had to do with the establisment of this Religious Liberty Clinic.
God bless, yours in Their Hearts,
Kenneth M. Fisher
Did you hear that Obama declared Jan 16 as religious freedom day?
An astonishing question, Skai. What did I say to lead you to wonder such a thing?
And Wicans, Moslems and others do not have equal religious rights in The United States? May I respectfully suggest a re-reading of the first amendment. Then perhaps a re-reading of seventeenth century American history. Most early European immigrants were fleeing tyrrany that, at least indirectly, was religiously based.