With a 65-page decision, the Joint Section of the Supreme Court (Sezioni Unite della Corte di Cassazione), the highest Italian Court, has ruled on the display of the crucifix in public school classrooms. Issued on September 9, 2021, decision no. 24414/2021 synthesizes an extensive number of precedents, including those of the Italian Constitutional Court and…
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…
Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash. On December 1, 2021, the United States Supreme Court will hear the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that threatens to be the death knell for abortion rights, reproductive freedom, and the right of women to bodily autonomy and security in the U.S. In Dobbs,…
Today the news broke that Kyle Rittenhouse had been “acquitted on all charges in the shooting deaths of two men and wounding of a third at a Wisconsin protest against racial injustice last year,” as AP put it. I don’t say this glibly: God help us. Rittenhouse, as we would say growing up, was clearly “looking for…
Moral Reflections on 21st Century Tax Policy Trends Susan Pace Hamill Tax policy, an important ethical issue that every voting citizen and public office holder must address, boils down to defining the amount of tax revenues needed and deciding how the burden for paying taxes should be allocated among taxpayers enjoying different levels of income…
Pope Francis and President Joe Biden at the Vatican, October 29, 2021. Wikimedia (PD-US). The meeting between President Joe Biden and Pope Francis at the Vatican has left us with memorable photographs and an important moment in history. What remains with me most vividly is the fact of the meeting itself, stripped of ceremony and…
Photo by Brad Dodson on Unsplash. One of the most contentious issues in constitutional law is whether governmental action amounts to “an establishment of religion” in violation of the First Amendment. For the past fifty years, the Court has often, but not always, resolved Establishment Clause cases using the three-pronged test established by Lemon v. Kurtzman. Under the…