Center for the Study of Law and Religion

The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia is dedicated to studying the religious dimensions of law, the legal dimensions of religion, and the interaction of legal and religious ideas and institutions, norms and practices. This study is predicated on the assumptions that religion gives law its spirit and inspires its adherence to ritual and justice. Law gives religion its structure and encourages its devotion to order and organization. Frank S. Alexander is the founding director and John Witte, Jr., is the director of the Center.

Emory University founded a program in law and religion in 1982 as part of its mission to build an interdisciplinary university and to increase understanding of the fundamental role religion has played in shaping law, politics, and society. Over the last three decades, the program has developed into the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, offering six degree programs, pursuing multi-year research projects, producing more than 300 books, and hosting major international conferences and distinguished lecture series. Since 2013, the Center also serves as the home of the Journal of Law and Religion. Back in 1982, no major law school in America was devoting serious scholarship or teaching to the field of law and religion. In fact, Emory’s vision of bringing religion into the study of law and other professional disciplines met with suspicion, even fear and hostility, from other academic institutions.

The founders of the law and religion program, Emory President James T. Laney and Emory Law Professor Frank S. Alexander, believed that the need for focused scholarship and teaching in this vital field of inquiry was paramount. Where else could students and scholars learn the fundamentals of church and state, religion and politics, faith and order? Where could they come to understand the inner workings of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic laws, and their respective places in the modern nation-state and global order? How could they explore the essential religious foundations and dimensions of law, politics, and society, in the West and beyond?

The burden of proof was on the program’s founders and faculty to demonstrate that law and religion was a legitimate area of serious interdisciplinary scholarship—that it would enhance understanding of law, not dilute or detract from rigorous legal study; that it would widen the horizons of religious education, not proselytize a particular faith or propagate a fundamentalist agenda.

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