Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience with Nathan Chapman and Michael McConnell
Professors Nathan Chapman (Georgia Law) and Michael McConnell (Stanford Law) join us to discuss their new book, Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience.
With responses by Professors Christopher Lund (Wayne State Law) and Elizabeth Sepper (Texas Law).
Nathan S. Chapman teaches and writes in constitutional law, religious liberty and ethics. The 2021 graduating class selected him to be a faculty marshal and the 2018 graduating class awarded him the C. Ronald Ellington Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a McDonald Distinguished Fellow of Law and Religion at the Emory Center for Law and Religion and a Nootbaar Fellow in Law and Religion at Pepperdine School of Law.
Chapman is the author, with Michael W. McConnell, of a forthcoming volume from the Oxford University Press titled Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Promotes Religious Pluralism and Protects Freedom of Conscience. His scholarship focuses on the historical and theoretical underpinnings of constitutional law, especially the law of religious liberty and due process. He has also written several essays on Christianity and the law.
Chapman holds degrees in law and theology from Duke University. He litigated in the Washington, D.C., office of WilmerHale and clerked for Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
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Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory.
He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His upcoming book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” will be published by Oxford University Press in early 2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google.
He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.