Professor Philip Hamburger on Religion and the Open Society

Columbia Law School Professor Participates
In Symposium Hosted by Council on Foreign Relations

March 31, 2008 (NEW YORK) – Experts debate how different forms of Christianity and Islam may have helped or sometimes hindered the development of free and open societies. Columbia Law School Professor Philip Hamburger addressed this issue at a symposium hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on March 25.

“Religion is fundamental to the very liberty that we think we sometimes need to protect from religion,” said Hamburger, who emphasized the interconnectedness between a society and its religion.

Hamburger was one of three panelists to speak on “Religion-State Relations,” the second of three panels at the Religion and the Open Society Symposium held by CFR. Also participating were Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, professor at Emory University Law School; and Noah Feldman, professor at Harvard Law School and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, moderated.

Hamburger, Columbia Law School’s Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, focuses on constitutional law and its history and has written extensively on religious liberty. His publications include Separation of Church and State (Harvard University Press, 2002), “Religious Freedom in Philadelphia” (Emory Law Journal, 2005), “More is Less” (Virginia Law Review, 2004) and “Against Separation” (The Public Interest, Spring 2004).

Religion and the Open Society was the third in a series of five symposia on religion and foreign policy organized by CFR and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. The first, Religious Conflict in Nigeria, took place May 8, 2007; the second, Evangelicals and U.S. Foreign Policy, took place November 30, 2007.

Video and transcript from the March 25 symposium are available here.

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