Senate Revisions to House Proposed Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, National Archives (US-PD) On October 15, Canopy Forum, hosted by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, will be organizing an online book symposium regarding Donald L. Drakeman’s upcoming book, to be published November 2026, titled The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience (Harvard University Press,…
The U.S. Constitution on display at the National Archives of the United States by APK (CC-BY-SA 4.0) This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This contribution addresses two questions of legal and political theory in connection to constitutionalism in general, and in the United States…
Senate Revisions to House Proposed Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, National Archives (US-PD) On October 15, Canopy Forum, hosted by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, will be organizing an online book symposium regarding Donald L. Drakeman’s upcoming book, to be published November 2026, titled The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience (Harvard…
Gods, Judges, and Presidents and the Sacred Grammar of Constitutional Authorityby Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV The following is an introductory essay to Charles Lincoln’s recently published book, Gods, Judges, and Presidents: Trifunctional Archetypes in American Law and Government (Bloomsbury Press, 2026). The American Constitution is usually introduced as a diagram. Congress legislates, the President executes, and…
Last page of the Union of Utrecht, 1579, Nationaal Archief (US-PD) This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume on The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn pointed to five major sources that helped drive the American revolutionaries…
“Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome” by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, 1758 (US-PD-Art). This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The issue of the cultural foundations of the Founding Fathers and of American constitutionalism in general is, perhaps, more apparent than real and, in any case,…
St. Mary’s Academy, Image Courtesy of SNJM Archives. This week, the first of the state of Oregon’s public schools will open their doors to a new school year. Teachers will reenter their classrooms to unfamiliar students, filled with the emotions of the fall’s start. In the next few weeks, the state’s private schools will join…
The Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy by Vyacheslav Argenberg (CC BY 4.0). Democratic systems in the contemporary world are often interpreted through the paradigm of secularization, understood as “the emergence of a civilization in which the holders of sacred knowledge no longer possess a monopoly over spiritual production, and in which civil society, emancipated…
A Free Exercise SurpriseDonald Drakeman The following is an introductory essay to Donald Drakeman’s upcoming book, The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience (Harvard University Press, 2026). Drakeman’s work will be available for purchase November 2026. In October, Canopy Forum will host an online book symposium to discuss Drakeman’s work. Read more about…
Constitutional Court of South Korea by Wei-Te Wong (CC BY-SA 2.0) Within five years, three of Asia’s major democracies stopped treating adultery as a crime. South Korea’s Constitutional Court struck it down in February 2015 in 2009 Hun-Ba 17; India followed in 2018, Taiwan in 2020. The pattern is usually filed under a familiar heading—traditional…