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Higher Law: Can Christian Conservatives Transform Law Through Legal Education?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Joshua C. Wilson  and
Amanda Hollis-Brusky
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Abstract

The allure of law schools as transformative institutions in the United States prompted Christian Right leaders to invest in legal education in the 1990s and early 2000s. The aspiration was to control the training of lawyers in order to challenge the secular legal monopoly on law, policy, and culture. In this article, we examine three leading Christian conservative law schools and one training program dedicated to transforming the law. We ask how each institution seeks to realize its transformative mission and analyze how they organize themselves to produce the kinds of capital (human, intellectual, social, cultural) needed to effectively change the law. To do so, we develop a typology of legal institution-building strategies (infiltration, supplemental, and parallel alternative) to compare the relative advantages and disadvantages of institutional forms. We conclude by discussing implications of our findings for those looking to law schools as sites of broader transformation within the law.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 835 - 870
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This article was produced in part with the support of the National Science Foundation's Law and Social Sciences division (Award numbers 1551871 and 1551863), Pomona College's Hirsch Research Initiation Grant, and the University of Denver's Professional Research Opportunities for Faculty Grant, Faculty Research Fund Grant, and Sabbatical Enhancement Award. Thank you to all the colleagues who provided helpful comments on various iterations of this article, with special thanks to Susan Sterett for her patience with the development of this article.

Please direct all correspondence to Joshua C. Wilson, Department of Political Science, Sturm Hall, 2000 E. Asbury Ave., Denver, CO 80208; e-mail: [email protected]; or Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Politics Department, 425 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711; e-mail: [email protected].

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