Virginia: Falwell Opening Law School

Saturday August 21, 2004

Tired of seeing the success of so many liberal lawyers, Jerry Falwell is starting a new law school with an explicitly conservative and religious mission. Will they accomplish anything? There's a good chance of that.

The Sun Times reports:

''We want to infiltrate the culture with men and women of God who are skilled in the legal profession,'' Falwell said in a telephone interview Tuesday with the Associated Press. ''We'll be as far to the right as Harvard is to the left.''

The problem here is that Harvard doesn’t have a policy of leaning left, they have a policy of being excellent. That’s why, after all, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro is going there. If the primary policy of Falwell’s law school is to be conservative, they risk sacrificing academic excellence to achieve it. If there is a choice between excellence and maintaining a conservative, religious orthodox belief, what will they pick?

Graduates of the law school -- part of Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, which is affiliated with his Baptist ministry -- could tackle such issues as abortion rights and gay marriage, Falwell said. Classes begin Monday for the first-year class of 61 law students. ''I'd love to fight Roe v. Wade,'' said incoming law student Heidi Thompson, 33, a Liberty graduate who has spent the past few years working as a high school counselor in Orlando, Fla. ''I have a long way to go before I find myself in front of the Supreme Court,'' Thompson said with a laugh. ''But I'm hoping through some medical advances and some legal intervention that people can recognize the great wrong that was done'' with the decision to legalize abortion.

Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the law school is part of a crusade by Falwell to get the government to carry out his religious agenda. ''When Falwell talks about using the legal system to advance his personal religious beliefs, I get a whiff of the Taliban,'' Conn said. ''This is a very diverse country with many different religious beliefs, and when you set up a law school to try to get the government and legal system to conform to only one of them, you're leaving everybody else out.''

It’s one thing to want to use the law to promote justice and liberty, but another I think to want to use the law to promote religion — even if you think that justice and liberty require the dominance of your religion. In a pluralistic society such as ours, it’s necessary for the law to be primarily secular in nature because it must be open to all. The law cannot be a bastion of religious orthodoxy as defined by a narrow segment of Protestant evangelicals.

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