Staff report
The annual Wm. T. (Bill) Robinson III Institute for Religious Liberty will be held at Thomas More University tonight at 7 p.m. in Steigerwald Hall.
The institute celebrates religious freedom as an unalienable right and is organized each year by Dr. Raymond Hebert, dean emeritus, who is executive director.
Keynote speaker is Stephanie Barclay, director of the Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative which promotes freedom of religion or belief for all people through advocacy, student formation, and scholarship.
Barclay’s research focuses on the role our different democratic institutions play in protecting minority rights, particularly at the intersection of free speech and religious exercise. Her academic writing has been published or is forthcoming in publications such as the Harvard Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Boston College Law Review.
Prior to joining the Notre Dame faculty, Barclay was an associate professor of law at BYU Law, where she was twice voted professor of the year. Before becoming a professor, Barclay litigated First Amendment cases in Washington, D.C., where she represented many clients at both the trial and appellate level, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. Barclay has also served as a law clerk to Judge N. Randy Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to Justice Neil Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court. She graduated summa cum laude from BYU Law School, where she was elected to the Order of the
Coif. She is completing a doctorate in law at Oxford University as a Clarendon Scholar and a Tang Scholar.
Guest commentators are:
• Holly Hinckley Lesan who works for the International Center for Law & Religion Studies at Brigham Young University (BYU) Law School and co-directs the Center’s Young Scholars Fellowship on Religion and the Rule of Law, held annually at Oxford University.
She also serves as the coordinating editor for the casebook “Law and Religion: National,
International, and Comparative Perspectives,” by W. Cole Durham, Jr. and Brett G. Scharffs. The casebook is used in law schools across the United States and abroad.
• Gary L. Greenberg who retired as a principal in the Cincinnati law office of Jackson
Lewis P.C. after more than 40 years of experience counseling and representing employers in a wide variety of workplace legal issues including representation of religious employers in employment law matters.
Greenberg served on the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Board of Governors Executive
Committee until May, 2022, and as president of the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati from May 2018 to May 2020.
Moderating the program is Robert Stern, assistant professor of history and legal studies at Thomas More University.
The program is free to attend and open to the public.