The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal TraditionJohn Witte, Jr. The following is excerpted from John Witte, Jr.’s The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal Tradition, out now from Cambridge University Press. Read Nicholas Wolterstorff’s review of the book here. For the past…
The Polish Contribution to the Global Legal CultureJohn Witte, Jr. The following is excerpted from Law and Christianity in Poland: The Legacy of the Great Jurists, edited by Franciszek Longchamps de Bérier and Rafael Domingo and out now from Routledge. This volume is another signature title in the book series on “Great Christian Jurists in…
Celebrating the Scholarship of Michael J. Perry Forward by John Witte, Jr. The following text is an excerpt from the Emory Law Journal’s new Festschrift honoring the scholarly work of Michael J. Perry, who serves as Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory Law School and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law…
Religion and the American Constitutional Experimentby John Witte, Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett Thomas Jefferson once described America’s new religious freedom guarantees as a “fair” and “novel experiment.” These guarantees, set out in the new state and federal constitutions of 1776 to 1791, defied the millennium-old assumptions inherited from Western Europe that…
Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russiaedited by Paul Valliere and Randall A. Poole This volume is part of a 50-volume series on “Great Christian Jurists in World History,” presenting the interaction of law and Christianity through the biographies of 1,000 legal figures of the past two millennia. Commissioned by the Center for the…
Law and Christianity in Latin America: The Work of Great Jurists edited by M.C. Mirow and Rafael Domingo This volume is part of a fifty-volume series on “Great Christian Jurists in World History, “presenting the interaction of law and Christianity through the biographies of 1000 legal figures of the past two millennia. Commissioned by the…
This article is part of our “What’s Wrong with Rights?” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The Development of Human Rights Half a century ago, the world welcomed some of the most remarkable human rights documents it had ever seen. The United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act…
The New Age of Rights In the 1990s, the European Union (EU) seemed to be done. The Old Continent was pacified. Soviet imperialism had melted away. European dictatorships — from Portugal to Spain, from Greece to Romania — had ended. European citizens could travel from Italy to the Netherlands, from Portugal to Germany, without border…
Christianity and Private Lawedited by Robert F. Cochran, Jr. andMichael P. Moreland Review by John Witte, Jr. This volume is one of several new introductions to Christianity and Law commissioned by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Each volume is an anthology of some twenty chapters written by leading…
This article is part of our “Children and Education Rights” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Why Suffer the Children? Overcoming Christian Opposition to Children’s Rights by John Witte, Jr. John Witte, Jr. is Robert W. Woodruff of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor of Religion, and Director of the Center for…