The Turn to Tradition in American Law and Culture

Richard W. Garnett is the Paul J. Schierl Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He teaches and writes about the freedoms of speech, association, and religion and about constitutional law more generally. He is a leading authority on questions and debates regarding church-state relations and the role of religious believers and beliefs in society. He has published widely on these matters and is the author of dozens of lawreview articles and book chapters and the co-author of three books. Professor Garnett is regularly invited to share analysis and commentary in national print and broadcast media, and he contributes to several law-related blogs, including Mirror of Justice and PrawfsBlawg.

He is the founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society, an interdisciplinary project that focuses on the role of religious institutions, communities, and authorities in the social order. He served on the Notre Dame Task Force on Catholic Education, is a Fellow of the University’s Institute for Educational Initiatives, and consults regularly with the Alliance for Catholic Education. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Professor Garnett clerked for the late Chief Justice of the United States, William H. Rehnquist, during the Court’s 1996 term and also for the late Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Richard S. Arnold. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Duke University in 1990. He joined the faculty in 1999 after practicing law in Washington, D.C., with Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin.

He and his wife, Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett, live in South Bend, Indiana and have four children.

Marc O. DeGirolami is the inaugural St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law and the Human Person at The Catholic University of America. His publications include The Constitution of Practice: On Law and Tradition (Cambridge University Press) and The Tragedy of Religious Freedom (Harvard University Press), as well as articles in the Yale Law Journal Forum, Notre Dame Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, Legal Theory, and the Boston College Law Review, among others. He has written in the popular press for The New York Times, The New Republic, First Things, Commonweal, and Law and Liberty.

Before joining the Columbus School of Law in 2024, he was the Cary Fields Professor of Law and the Co-Director of the Mattone Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s Law School. He has also been a Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s Department of Politics, as well as a Visiting Professor at Notre Dame Law School and Catholic University, Columbus School of Law.

He has taught Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Criminal Law, Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Inquiry, Jurisprudence, Law and Religion, Professional Responsibility, and Torts.

Jennifer N. Martin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theology with a joint appointment in the Program of Liberal Studies at Notre Dame. She is working on the second edition of The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism. Her book, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought, was one of 10 international winners of the 2017 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. In 2019 she received the Frank O’Malley Undergraduate Teaching Award.