Last Saturday, the Roanoke (VA) Times carried an interesting article on Liberty University's School of Law, and more generally on "faith-based law schools". Liberty University's founder Jerry Falwell says the law school is training "lieutenants for the Lord". Most of the school's 160 students share conservative Christian views on school prayer, abortion, homosexuality and the death penalty. The law school's new interim dean is Mat Staver, executive director of the Liberty Counsel. He says: "[W]e are a Christian school, but we teach law and the foundation of the law. We're not opening up the book on Exodus to find our position on capital punishment."
Defending Liberty University's approach, Nikolas Mikas, president of the Bioethics Defense Fund says, "Without a true Christian rooting of a legal education, all you have is law as power instead of law as justice." Criticizing the law school, Jeremy Leaming on Wall of Separation blog says "Jerry Falwell’s law school aspires to produce lawyers committed to wrecking the First Amendment principle of church-state separation. " Liberty Law School received provisional accreditation from the American Bar Association in February.
