The Occasional Observer

The National Catholic Register went a bit deeper in explaining the cases they will take:

Based at Stanford’s Mills Legal Clinic, the training program will focus on two types of cases: plaintiffs seeking “accommodation” of religious beliefs and practices and plaintiffs engaging with the public square, possibly to secure access to public facilities or obtain approval for building houses of worship.

“Real-time" cases include a prisoner who converted to Judaism and now needs permission to be circumcised and zoning approval for a mosque. Sonne said that students would work on cases that were less likely to be entangled in partisan politics, avoiding, for example, legal challenges to the HHS mandate or free-exercise cases arising from opposition to same-sex “marriage"...

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has represented plaintiffs from many religious traditions, and Sonne suggested that the public interest group’s “vision fits in well with an academic environment that offers a different perspective: Whether you are representing a mosque or an evangelical church, the question is whether they have the freedom to act in accord with their conscience.”

Sonne added that the decision to select less incendiary cases for the clinic docket did not signal a retreat from a strong commitment to religious liberty: “We think that religious liberty is a natural right. The kind of cases we will handle will manifest that belief, regardless of the issue.”

I was genuinely (and happily) surprised that a part of the higher-education establishment would consent to this type of clinic. Perhaps there is still some hope that our most prestigious graduate programs, who have a great deal of influence in determining who among us will eventually access the most important levers of power, may be embracing a bit more ideological diversity. From the Times story:

Lawrence C. Marshall, the associate dean for clinical legal education at Stanford Law School [states] “My mission has been to make clinical education as central to legal education as it is to medical education. Just as we are concerned about diversity in gender, race and ethnicity, we ought to be committed to ideological diversity.” Mr. Marshall became a hero to liberals for his work to exonerate death penalty inmates when he was a professor at Northwestern Law School a decade ago.

[Bold face is my emphasis]

A welcome development indeed.