The Rise of Religious Liberty and the Decline of A Public Morality with Katherine Franke

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In June 2022, in a 24 hour period, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two very significant decisions: one that read the text of the constitution to provide extremely strong rights to carry guns in public, and the other declaring that the constitution provides no protection for the right to an abortion. Professor Katherine Franke, James L. Dohr Professor Emerita of Law, discusses how these two cases stand for a larger trend in the conception of rights in the U.S. at this time in which the right has successfully captured a classically liberal conception of "rights as trumps”. In cases involving gun rights, religious liberty, and the right to resist public health measures during the COVID pandemic, fundamental constitutional rights have been successfully deployed to deconstitutionalize the state’s power to regulate in the name of public welfare.

Katherine Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor Emerita of Law from Columbia University, and the former Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. She was also on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, sexuality race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory. Professor Franke is currently retired from Columbia University.

Her first book, "Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality" (NYU Press 2015), considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for "Wedlocked." Her second book, "Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Slavery’s Abolition" (Haymarket Press 2019), makes the case for racial reparations in the United States by returning to a time at the end of slavery when many formerly enslaved people were provided land explicitly as a form of reparation, yet after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the land was stolen back from freed people and given to former slave owners.