Recent Essays


 

Washington and Lee has more than just a controversial name.Richmond Times-Dispatch Op-Ed | June 20, 2021

California is finally confronting its history of slavery. Here’s how.Washington Post Op-Ed | May 24, 2021

Why the split in the Methodist Church should set off alarm bells for Americans.Washington Post Op-Ed | January 16, 2020

 

Articles


 

“Staying in Place: Religion, Race and Property in the post-Civil War South,” (draft article in progress)

“Westward on the Tortured Path: Law and Slavery in Utah and California,” Kevin A. Waite, co-author (draft article in progress)

“The First Wall of Separation between Church and State: Race, Religion, and Disestablishment in Late Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Journal of Southern History (February 2019)

“Fatal Convergence: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in Religious History,” Jan Shipps, co-author, Journal of the Early Republic (July 2017), winner, Arrington-Prucha Prize, Western History Association, 2018

“The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 2015), co-winner, Lester A. Cappon Award, William and Mary Quarterly, 2015

“The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property before the Civil War,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review (January 2014)

“Where the Action Is: Religion and Law,” Religion and American Culture (Summer, 2008)

“‘Free’ Religion and ‘Captive’ Schools: Catholics, Protestants, and School Funding at Mid-Century,” DePaul Law Review (2007)

“Friendship and Scholarship: A Report from the Archives” (Utah State University Press, 2007)

“Blasphemy and Religious Liberty in Antebellum America,” American Quarterly 52 (December 2000)

“‘The Liberty of Self-Degradation’: Anti-Polygamy, Woman Suffrage and the Law of Marriage and Divorce,” Journal of American History 83 (December 1996), reprinted in Law in the West, Gordon Bakken & Brenda Farrington, eds. (Garland Publishing, 2001)

“‘Our National Hearthstone’: Anti-Polygamy Fiction and the Sentimental Campaign Against Moral Diversity in Antebellum America,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 8 (1996)

“The Creation of a Usable Judicial Past: Max Lerner, Class Conflict, and the Propagation of Judicial Titans,” New York University Law Review 70 (1995)

“The Doctrine of Accommodation in the Jurisprudence of the Religion Clauses,” DePaul Law Review 37 Arlin Adams, co-author (1988)

 
 

Book Chapters


 

“The First Wall of Separation between Church and State: Race, Religion, and Disestablishment in Late Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Benjamin F. Park, ed., A Companion to American Religious History (Wiley 2021)

“Religious Corporations and Disestablishment, 1780-1840,” in Micah Schwartzman and Zoe Robinson, eds., The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press 2016)

“Mormons and the Law,” in Philip Barlow and Terryl Givens, eds., Oxford Handbook of Mormonism (Oxford University Press 2015)

“The Landscape of Belief: Disestablishment and Confiscation of Religious Property in the Early Republic,” in Daniel J. Hulsebosch and Richard B. Bernstein, eds., Making Legal History: Essays in Honor of William E Nelson (NYU Press 2013)

“The New Age and the New Law: Malnak v Yogi and the Definition of Religion in Constitutional Law” in Leslie Griffin, ed., Religion and Law Stories (Aspen Press 2010)

“Law and Religion, 1790-1920,” in Cambridge History of American Law, Michael Grossberg & Christopher L. Tomlins, eds. (Cambridge University Press 2008)

“Law and Everyday Death: Infanticide and the Hester Vaughn Case,” Lives in the Law, Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas and Martha Merrill Umphrey, eds. (University of Michigan Press, 2006)

“Law and the Contact of Cultures,” in Blackwell Companion to the American West, William Deverell, ed. (Blackwell Publishers 2004)

“Politics, Marriage, and the Texture of History,” in Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America, Alison M. Parker & Stephanie Cole, eds. (Texas A&M University Press, 2000)