Religion and the Constitution, Fifth Edition

Michael McConnell

Professor Michael W. McConnell is a leading authority on freedom of speech and religion, the relation of individual rights to government structure, originalism, and various other aspects of constitutional history and constitutional law. He is author of numerous articles and co-author of two casebooks: The Constitution of the United States (Foundation Press) and Religion and the Constitution (Aspen). In addition to teaching, he is the director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, which was founded in 2006 to explore and improve public understanding of the most pressing constitutional issues.

Professor McConnell brings wide practical experience to bear on his teaching and scholarship. Before joining Stanford in 2009, he served as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and was frequently mentioned as a possible nominee to the Supreme Court. He is the only full-time professor of law in the nation who has previously served as a federal judge. He also has been involved in extensive appellate litigation, including arguing 12 cases in the United States Supreme Court, including one case in October Term 2009. Before his appointment to the bench, McConnell was Presidential Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, and prior to that the William B. Graham Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He has taught five times as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. He served as law clerk to then Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court. McConnell was an assistant general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and an assistant to the Solicitor General in the Department of Justice under President Ronald Reagan. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Christopher C. Lund

Christopher C. Lund is an associate professor of law at Wayne State University Law School, where he teaches a variety of courses, including Torts, Contracts, Constitutional Law, Religious Liberty in the United States and Evidence. Excited to teach students, he has been voted Professor of the Year five times.

Lund's scholarly interests vary, but his principal focus has been in the field of religious liberty. His academic work has been (or shortly will be) published in student-edited law reviews, such as the Northwestern University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the Minnesota Law Review; peer-reviewed legal journals, such as the Journal of Law and Religion; and peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journals, such as History of Religions. He recently joined Michael McConnell and Thomas Berg as the new co-author on their leading casebook, Religion and the Constitution, the fourth edition of which was published by Aspen in 2016.

Lund's academic work has been cited in articles, books and judicial opinions. He is regularly called on for his expertise by media outlets, civil rights organizations and religious groups. Two of his amicus briefs have been quoted in opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Stephen Breyer calling one of them ''very excellent'' at oral argument. He is a past chair of the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools, as well as past chair of the Section on New Law Professors. He sits on the lawyers' committee of the ACLU of Michigan.

Lund joined Wayne University Law School in 2009 from the Mississippi College School of Law. Before teaching, he clerked for the Honorable Karen Nelson Moore on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, served as the Madison Fellow at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and practiced law at Dechert LLP in Philadelphia. Lund earned his law degree with high honors from the University of Texas School of Law and his bachelor of arts from Rice University, summa cum laude, with majors in mathematics and psychology.

During fall semester 2013, Lund was on leave from Wayne Law, teaching at the University of Notre Dame Law School.

Thomas C. Berg

Before joining the University of St. Thomas faculty, Thomas Berg taught for 10 years at Samford University’s Cumberland Law School. In addition to teaching constitutional law, law and religion, intellectual property, civil procedure, and federal courts, Berg has established himself as one of the leading scholars of law and religion in the United States. He has written approximately 60 articles in law reviews and religion journals on religious freedom, constitutional law, and the role of religion in law, politics and society. Berg is the author of The State and Religion in a Nutshell (now in a second edition), part of West Publishing Company's leading series of law books; and he is co-author with Michael McConnell and John Garvey of Religion and the Constitution, a casebook published by Aspen Publishing (second edition forthcoming). Berg is also working on Diversity and Devotion, a legal and cultural history of American church-state relations since World War II.
At St. Thomas, Berg is co-director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy. He has written more than 25 briefs on issues of religious liberty and free speech in the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts and has often testified to Congress in support of legislation protecting religious freedom. For this work, he received the Religious Liberty Defender of the Year Award from the Christian Legal Society in 1996. He has also received the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award (2004) from the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, for the Religion and the Constitution casebook, and the John Courtney Murray Award from DePaul University College of Law for scholarly and other contributions to church-state studies.