Founding the Journal of Law and Religion: A Reflection Forty Years On

Abstract

The Journal of Law and Religion emerged in 1982 from a conversation between me as a new dean of the Hamline University School of Law and Harvard Law School professor Harold Berman. I had known Hal as a student and then as assistant dean at the Harvard Law School before taking upmy post as dean at Hamline. I called Hal in the early fall of that year to catch up and to get his advice on my desire to start something educational in law and religion. He suggested making Hamline home to a new journal, and he later gave us a gift of $30,000 to cover initial administrative expenses. What was in my mind? Two concerns. First, a very parochial, pragmatic decanal concern: How could I build support for the law school among the alums and faculty of Minnesota’s oldest liberal arts college and one with a close affiliation to the United Methodist Church? Second, from being around the Harvard Law School as a student and later as assistant dean, I had a sense that there was a void in legal studies and legal education generally: the absence of compelling justification for the rule of law as foundational for any humane civil order. Hamline was a very young law school. I was its third dean. Creating something focused on law and religion could, I thought, strategically bridge these two concerns by positioning this new school as having a distinctive approach to the study of law, an approach that would inspire faculty ambitions in teaching and research, attract students, give the school a mission different from those of its two local competitors, draw attention to the school from bench and bar and academics, and address the worrisome void in legal education. Hamline University was the oldest university in Minnesota, founded in 1854 by the Methodist Conference. In 1982, the university was still operating under the auspices of the Methodist Conference. The university’s trustees were approved, as I recall, by annual meetings of the conference, and about half of the trustees were Methodist pastors. The law school had been founded as an independent school—known originally as the Midwestern School of Law—but the American Bar Association required that it merge with an established university or college in order to receive accreditation. Having previously discontinued its graduate education, Hamline University was open to adding a professional school to its undergraduate program, and thus the Midwestern School of Law, with its faculty, staff, and students merged into Hamline University. However, a number of old Hamline University donors and alums were concerned that a law school did not really fit with the antinomian Methodist tradition emphasizing John Wesley’s commitments to knowledge and vital piety. That important Hamline constituency was not eager to embrace the law school and its mission. Such skepticism about the value of