Three Score and One Make Up Inaugural Class for Christian Law School
by Allie Martin and Jody Brown
August 23, 2004
(AgapePress) - Classes start today (Monday) at a Christian law school at Liberty University in Virginia. The objective, according to Liberty's founder Dr. Jerry Falwell, is to "infiltrate the culture with men and women of God" who are skilled in the legal profession.Sixty-one students are in the inaugural class at the Liberty University School of Law in Lynchburg, Virginia. The school was founded by well-known evangelist Jerry Falwell as a way to combat the secular influence at law schools nationwide. In a recent interview with Associated Press, Falwell promised that the school will be "as far to the right as Harvard is to the left."
Bruce Green, dean of the LU School of Law, says the Liberty law students will be equipped to incorporate a biblical worldview into the practice of law.
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Bruce Green |
"Those in the America legal system -- and really, Americans in general -- have really been able and willing over a long period of time to tolerate more and more of the kinds of ideas that really undercut our foundational structure in the American legal system and also our foundational documents. So in a real sense, the responsibility is ours because we tolerate more and we have not been willing to say 'We really believe that we ought to stand up and be counted and speak the truth."That is why, he says, there is such a big need for a law school willing to combat the long-standing secular influence. "We believe we have something to offer -- and it's going to take a while to impact the culture and really restore a lot of the groundwork that's been undercut by modern approaches to law."
Last week during orientation, students were introduced to the mission-driven perspective of the law school. During his inaugural address on Wednesday, Green told the law students the school has "an emphatically historic vision" of the triune God, creation, fall, redemption, renewal, and their relation.
"This vision," the law school dean explained, "derives from scripture and centers on the person and work of Jesus Christ" and is based on historical writings from within the Christian faith. "This is the historic foundation that led to the founding of our country and the American legal system. To know and understand this ... is critical to understanding certain components of the American system."
Green also explained that the idea of a Christian law school is not to educate future lawyers as usual -- not to "tack a Bible class to education-as-usual" -- but "'lays Christ at the bottom' of all knowledge and learning, and then explores ... what it means to build on this faith for a lifetime."
"Our faith provides us with a way of seeing the world, and we mediate that way of seeing things to others through the acts of legal education we engage in every day," Green continued. "We create cultures and build educational institutions that way -- and sometimes we build the cultures of educational institutions that way. That is the way we will build this law school."
The website for the Liberty University School of Law describes the educational philosophy those 61 students -- as well as any prospective students -- can expect to find: a commitment to academic and professional excellence; an appreciation for the Western legal tradition and the rule of law; an uncompromising dedication to the Christian intellectual tradition; an allegiance to constitutional interpretivism (i.e., "the view that the nature of judicial power is to state, interpret, and apply the Constitution"); and an emphasis on the development of superior communication skills.
