It is both an honor and a pleasure to be asked to participate in this festschrift for my friend and colleague, Robert E. Rodes, Jr. Since I joined the Notre Dame Law School faculty in 1998, Bob has been an inspiration to me in so many different ways, and in my opinion, he exemplifies the best tradition of an American man of letters. It is a rare American law school that can boast a faculty member whose interests range from medieval French and English law to modern civil procedure, legal ethics, poverty law and liberation theology. But we at Notre Dame have all this in Bob, and it is through these wide-ranging interests that I found not only intellectual common ground with him, but also a mentor and a friend.

It just so happens that Bob and I received our undergraduate and law degrees from the same institutions, Brown University and Harvard Law School. Although our experiences at both places were separated by almost forty years, I like to think that our shared educational provenance links us in a special way. In addition, for the last five years or so, we have belonged to the same parish and, more often than not, we attend the same mass. This has offered our professional relationship the wonderful counterpoise of the fellowship of our parish community, and it has given me and my wife, Robin, a chance to spend more time with Bob's delightful wife Jeanne, to whom he has been married over fifty years.

President George H.W. Bush caused a few chuckles—and, more than likely, a few groans—when, out on the trail during the 1988 presidential campaign, he recalled being shot down over the South Pacific in World War II:

Mother, Dad, God, faith—“and the separation of church and state.” This train of thought probably strikes us as a bit absurd. And yet, it is entirely American. That “God” and “faith” could not be invoked by the future President, as “fundamental values,” without the addition of “the separation of church and state” speaks volumes about how we Americans think about the content and implications of religious freedom, our “first freedom.” Indeed, Professor Daniel Dreisbach observed not long ago that “[n]o metaphor in American letters has had a greater influence on law and policy than Thomas Jefferson's ‘wall of separation between church and state.’” For many Americans, this metaphor supplies—in Professor Philip Hamburger's words—the “authoritative interpretation” of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses; and “vast numbers of [us] have come to understand [our] religious freedom in terms of Jefferson's phrase. As a result, Jefferson's words often seem more familiar than the words of the First Amendment itself.”

But let the brother of low degree glory in his high estate: and the rich, in that he is made low.—James 1:9-10

I am starting this paper after looking at the latest of a series of e-mails regarding people who cannot scrape up the security deposits required by the local gas company to turn their heat back on. They keep shivering in the corners of their bedrooms or burning their houses down with defective space heaters. The public agency that is supposed to relieve the poor refuses to pay security deposits, and the private charities that pay deposits are out of money. A bill that might improve matters has passed one House of the Legislature, and is about to die in a committee of the other House. I have a card on my desk from a former student I ran into the other day. She works in the field of utility regulation, and has promised to send me more e-mails on the subject. I also have a pile of student papers on whether a lawyer can encourage a client illegally in the country to marry her boyfriend in order not to be deported.

What I am trying to do with all this material is exercise a preferential option for the poor. I am working at it in a large, comfortable chair in a large, comfortable office filled with large, comfortable books, and a large—but not so comfortable—collection of loose papers. At the end of the day, I will take some of the papers home with me to my large, comfortable, and well heated house.