The Mormon student group at Harvard Law School is sponsoring a conference for LDS law students to be held next month at Harvard. All interested parties are invited. Below is a message from one of the event organizers.
- Greetings
On February 13 and 14 we will be holding the first annual LDS Law Student Conference on the Harvard Law School campus. The exact theme of the conference is still being worked out but Dean Michael Young of the George Washington Law School will be the keynote speaker. Prof. Mary Ann Glendon here at Harvard will also be speaking. Tom Griffith (BYU’s general counsel and former general counsel to the US senate), Cole Durham (BYU law professor), and others will be participating. We anticipate that this will be a great experience for LDS law students as well as professionals to gather and discuss pertinent issues surrounding the law and Mormonism from the practical to the theoretical. If you have any questions please feel free to email me at [email protected].
HL Rogers
This ought to be fun. I would go if I had the time, money, and freedom to head up to Cambridge for a couple of days.
Sounds like the LDS group at HLS is doing some great stuff. Good for them. Oh that LDSSA had been so anxiously engaged when I was there (1997-2000). My experience was something of a disappointment. I remember thinking, “Gee, look at all these really smart Mormons in one room. We should take advantage of this situation and have some really interesting discussions.” But alas, it was not meant to be. What should have been a sort of weekly “Times & Seasons”-ish powwow was usually nothing more than a bland, Sunday School lesson redux. Why so many LDS feel the need to model their religious discussions on the Sunday School model whenever they congregate in substantial numbers, I’ll never understand.
I and a couple other students offered up a number of worthwhile works (in our opinions) as reading selections for the semester when suggestions were solicited. I specifically suggested _Zion in the Courts_ – a work of obvious potential interest and relevance for a group of aspiring Mormon lawyers. But no, this work was not “spiritual” enough to please the Institute director (Why we felt obligated to Institute is a mystery I’ll never understand). Instead, we ended up reading some obscure, 19th Century Mormon pamphlet, without any evident historical significance, enumerating the “doctrines of Mormonism.” (Actually, I quit going, so I can’t say for sure what was read…)
It’s good to see something of substance is finally going on.
Aaron B
We had a similarlly strange relationship with the institute while I was there. One institute instructor kept showing up and making comments about how it was all right for us intellectuals to have questions. Everyone felt either patronized or annoyed or both.
When I was there we did have a reading group that met semi-weekly to discuss some article related to law and religion or to Mormonism. It was fun and the institute flunky was pointedly not invited.
We had a similarlly strange relationship with the institute while I was there. One institute instructor kept showing up and making comments about how it was all right for us intellectuals to have questions. Everyone felt either patronized or annoyed or both.
When I was there we did have a reading group that met semi-weekly to discuss some article related to law and religion or to Mormonism. It was fun and the institute flunky was pointedly not invited.
Its interesting to me that the Mormon law students at Harvard had anything to do with the Institute.
The Mormons at Columbia law had a little group that met weekly and talked about whatever we wanted to. The level of discussion varied greatly depending on which students were there, but it was fun and uninhibited. We had zero contact with the institute folks.
Greg,
Those certainly were some fun conversations. We have seen a few of the same faces here — Steve Evans makes somewhat regular comments, and Steve Sandberg also weighs in sometimes. I think those are the only two I’ve seen — now we need the rest of the J Reubs to drop by.