Religion, Morality, and the Constitutional Order

Historically, debates over the meaning of religious liberty in the United States has taken place largely at the local level. Linda Przybyszewski examines the origins of this sociopolitical custom and how it changed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Supreme Court opened the door to federal challenges to local religious interpretations of the First Amendment.

Linda Przybyszewski is an associate professor of American legal, constitutional, cultural, and intellectual history at the University of Notre Dame. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her B.A. from Northwestern University. She has published The Republic according to John Marshall Harlan (1999) and the articles The Fuller Court (1888-1910): Property and Liberty(in The Supreme Court of the United States: The Pursuit of Justice, 2005), Judicial Conservatism and Protestant Faith: The Case of Justice David J. Brewer(Journal of American History, 2004), and The Religion of a Jurist: Justice David Brewer and the Christian Nation(Journal of Supreme Court History, fall 2000). She also edited the memoirs of John Marshall Harlan’s wife, Malvina Shankin Harlan, Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854-1911 (2002, with a preface by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg). She has held several national fellowships, most recently from the American Council of Learned Societies, and is currently working on studies of the Cincinnati Bible War-which began when city’s school board ended Bible reading in 1869-and American dressing in the twentieth century.