Monica Goodling's announcement that she will take the Fifth in any testimony she is forced to give Congress has placed Regent University School of Law directly in the crosshairs of liberals.
What is Regent University School of Law? Besides the alma mater of Goodling, it is the Christian law school Pat Robertson started about 20 years ago.
This Boston Globe story by Charlie Savage does a good job of showing the warts of Regent along with the vast improvement in the school.
Regent was accredited in 1996 by the American Bar Association, but the school's bar passage rate has been abyssmal (a failure rate as high as 60%).
Goodling is a product of that school, and the current "scandal" over the use of presidential power to fire political appointments has raised questions about the sorts of attorneys hired to make recommendations. In Goodling's case, she has no prosecutorial experience, yet was making recommendations about who should stay and who should go.
But even in its darker days, Regent has had no better friend than the Bush administration. Graduates of the law school have been among the most influential of the more than 150 Regent University alumni hired to federal government positions since President Bush took office in 2001, according to a university website.
One of those graduates is Monica Goodling , the former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who is at the center of the storm over the firing of US attorneys. Goodling, who resigned on Friday, has become the face of Regent overnight -- and drawn a harsh spotlight to the administration's hiring of officials educated at smaller, conservative schools with sometimes marginal academic reputations.
Documents show that Goodling, who has asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress, was one of a handful of officials overseeing the firings. She helped install Timothy Griffin , the Karl Rove aide and her former boss at the Republican National Committee, as a replacement US attorney in Arkansas.
Because Goodling graduated from Regent in 1999 and has scant prosecutorial experience, her qualifications to evaluate the performance of US attorneys have come under fire. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, asked at a hearing: "Should we be concerned with the experience level of the people who are making these highly significant decisions?"
And across the political blogosphere, critics have held up Goodling, who declined to be interviewed, as a prime example of the Bush administration subordinating ability to politics in hiring decisions.
Frankly, I would be impressed with the current concern about qualifications over politics if I were certain the Democrats levelling the charges had shown the same sorts of concerns over Democratic appointments in the past. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced of that.
Regent University School of Law was founded as a Christian law school, designed to churn out Christian lawyers who would make the cases and arguments Christians need made to win in courts of law.
I've written previously that law school teaches you to "think like a lawyer." Unfortunately, most law schools will also teach you to "think like a liberal lawyer." That end is reached by belittling conservative arguments during mock debates or classroom discussions when liberal law professors bully their students. It's also accomplished when students are guided into pro bono work for organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and discouraged from joining the Christian Legal Society.
Savage's story points out (near the bottom, of course) that Regent's bar passage rate has improved dramatically in the last 10 years as the school tightened admissions requirements and course curriculum, and that the school has won numerous prestigious moot court and negotiations competitions.
The bar exam passage rate of Regent alumni , according to the Princeton Review, rose to 67 percent last year. Brauch said it is now up to 71 percent, and that half of the students admitted in the late 1990s would not be accepted today. The school has also recently won moot-court and negotiation competitions, beating out teams from top-ranked law schools.
Adding to Regent's prominence, its course on "Human Rights, Civil Liberties, and National Security" is co taught by one of its newest professors: Ashcroft.
Even a prominent critic of the school's mission of integrating the Bible with public policy vouches for Regent's improvements. Barry Lynn , the head of the liberal Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said Regent is churning out an increasingly well-trained legal army for the conservative Christian movement.
"You can't underestimate the quality of a lot of the people that are there," said Lynn, who has guest-lectured at Regent and debated professors on its campus.
In truth, the change in Regent is very discomforting for the left, who don't like Christian lawyers because they might change the law.
actually I do see a problem with Christian legal scholarship, and particularly with the extent of its influence in Bush's America. The Federalist Society may not be any better, but how is it possible for religious (in this case conservative evangelical Christian) legal scholarship not to distort the law according to its own religious purposes? If you're out to do God's work, after all, you likely won't have much time to do the work of a secular liberal democracy with safeguards against religious rule like the United States. (Read some Thomas Jefferson.) Unless, of course, you think that doing God's work is also doing America's work, that America is -- or should be -- God's political expression on earth. Or, looking at it another way, unless you think that America isn't a secular liberal democracy at all but rather a theocracy that has been taken over by secular liberal democrats.
Regardless, there is something profoundly anti-American about this Christian leadership out to change the world. It's bad for America, which isn't the theocracy these zealots imagine it to be, and likely also bad for Christianity, which ought to concern itself not with politics but with faith.
What Michael Stricklings fails to see is that our legal system is built on advocacy, and that advocacy can be for good and ill. The fact is, in our adversarial system, the best argument wins. What Stricklings and ACLU types are concerned about is that Regent will turn out enough good lawyers who make better arguments and win more cases than the liberals do. It would be a shame if Christians beat them at their own game, wouldn't it?
I feel sorry for the Stricklings and their ilk in this country. Just as Amanda loathes religious arguments for policies, Strickling is fearful of "theocracy," which is liberalspeak for "laws liberals disagree with." It's ok when the law is applied in a way that is considered immoral by Christians or that restricts religious belief, behavior, or influence. But don't let Christians win the legal arguments or it's a theocracy.
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