Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law

05/25/2026

Be sure to check out the latest Around the Web collection of law and religion news stories on our website!

05/18/2026

Visit the link in our bio to read this week’s issue of Around the Web, featuring important law-and-religion news stories unfolding around the world.

04/29/2026

It’s been a productive 2025–2026 academic year at the Denise ’90 and Michael ’91 Mattone Center for Law and Religion, and we’re pleased to share some highlights.

Our animated video series, Landmark Cases in Religious Freedom, continued on YouTube with episodes on West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette and Everson v. Board of Education — and has now reached 478,000 views and counting. Legal Spirits is going strong as well, with 77 episodes and 21,600 listens to date. The Law and Religion Forum blog had 55,000 views over the past academic year.

This year, the Center also hosted a regional conference of the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies, welcomed Judge Ioannis Ktistakis of the European Court of Human Rights, sponsored our annual symposium with the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies, co-hosted an international conference in Seoul and Kyoto, and hosted the ninth edition of the International Moot Court Competition in Law and Religion at St. John’s Rome campus.

We are grateful to our students, alumni, faculty colleagues, friends, and supporters for making this work possible.
Read the full annual report here:

It’s been a productive 2025-2026 academic year at St. John’s Denise ’90 and Michael ’91 Mattone Center for Law and Religion and we’re pleased to share some highlights and achievements with you.

04/20/2026

In AtW: Bishop James Massa, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, responded VP Vance's criticism of Pope Leo XIV, the Justice Department released a report concluding that the Biden DOJ "engaged in biased enforcement of the FACE Act," Ohio Attorney General David Yost filed suit seeking to prevent Hebrew Union College (HUC) from closing its 150-year-old Cincinnati rabbinical school, and more!

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

04/14/2026

New publication from Center Director Mark Movsesian examining human dignity in comparative constitutional law. Engaging Andrea Pin's "Dignity in Judgment," Movsesian explores how courts across jurisdictions define dignity—and why a secular, autonomy-based understanding predominates in practice. Link below:

Among the Sierra Nevada, California by Albert Bierstadt (US-PD). This article is part of our Book Review Roundtable on Andrea Pin’s book, Dignity in Judgement: Constitutional Adjudication in Comparative Perspective (2025).If you’d like to check out other reviews in this series, click here. Human...

04/13/2026

Visit the link in our bio to read this week’s issue of Around the Web, featuring important law-and-religion news stories unfolding around the world. 🖥️✍🏻📖

04/02/2026

New Legal Spirits short take: Chiles v. Salazar.

In this episode, Professor discusses the Supreme Court’s 8-1 ruling and argues that, although Chiles is formally a free speech case, it also shows how religious-freedom disputes often come to the Court in a free-speech guise. Religion does not appear in the Court’s doctrinal analysis, but it is very much part of the background.

Listen here: https://lawandreligionforum.org/2026/04/02/legal-spirits-076-a-short-take-on-chiles-v-salazar/

03/30/2026

Visit the link in our bio to read this week’s issue of Around the Web featuring important law-and-religion news stories unfolding this week!