In August, I reported that a “Landmark Court Decision Affirms Church’s Right to Discipline.” The article detailing the important constitutional victory was written by my personal assistant Bob Renaud, a law student at Oak Brook School of Law, and a key member of our team at the Witherspoon School of Law and Public Policy. Bob and fellow classmate Lael Weinberger, took the thesis presented in the Vision Forum published commentary and turned it into a a formal law review article. Expanding Bob’s recent article on the Texas Supreme Court decision in Westbrook v. Penley, Bob and Lael authored an article entitled: Spheres of Sovereignty: Church Autonomy Doctrine, and the Theological Heritage of the Separation of Church and State.

With an interdisciplinary approach that covers both theology and history, as well as the current case law on the subject, this is a helpful article that will be able to be a teaching tool to lawyers on the proper role of church and state. They submitted the article to over a hundred law reviews and received several offers to have it published. They chose to allow Northern Kentucky Law School to publish their article. It will be published in Volume 35 of the Northern Kentucky Law Review (2008).

Bob and Lael are the first Oak Brook students to have a law review article published in the school’s thirteen years of existence.