Law Professor to Discuss Religious Liberty Oct. 12

Dr. Douglas Laycock, the Alice McKean Young Regents Chair in Law at the University of Texas at Austin, will be the featured speaker at Baylor University's fifth annual Robert T. Miller Professorship Distinguished Lecture Series. Laycock will lecture on "The Realignment of Religious Conflict and the Declining Status of Religious Liberty" at 7 p.m. Monday in the Jones Theater in the Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center on the Baylor campus. He also will lead an informal discussion on church-state issues at 3:30 p.m. Monday in room 337 of the Draper Academic Building.
A leading advocate of religious liberty legislation, Laycock has argued two cases before the United States Supreme Court. He represented the church in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, and Archbishop Flores in City of Boerne v. Flores, a case which struck down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
In lower courts, Laycock has represented a wide range of groups such as the American Jewish Congress, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs and the National Association of Evangelicals. Additionally, he has published many scholarly articles on religious liberty and is the author of Modern American Remedies: Cases and Materials and The Death of the Irreparable Injury Rule. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The lecture series, which is sponsored by Baylor's department of political science, is named for the late Dr. Robert T. Miller, who taught in the political science department at Baylor from 1946-1995, serving as the chair of the department from 1962-1990.
The lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the department of political science at 710-3161.