Prometheus 6

Falwell's School Joins Others in Teaching Law to Their Flocks
The legal program at the reverend's university represents the latest effort by the religious right to change American society.
By Emma Schwartz
Times Staff Writer

November 21, 2004

LYNCHBURG, Va. — What Debra Meador read disturbed her. It didn't seem right that schoolchildren were once barred from holding prayer groups after class. Or that the Ten Commandments couldn't be displayed in a government building.

So at 34, the human relations specialist from Lynchburg made good on a longtime interest by enrolling in law school. But unlike most prospective lawyers, she applied to only one place.

"I wanted to take it in a Christian setting," said Meador, a member of the inaugural law class at Liberty University, a Baptist college founded here in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. "I don't believe anyone could be neutral. We're willing to tell you what we believe and to follow that."

The school, like Meador, who aspires to argue cases before the Supreme Court, has grand designs. Right now, it has only 60 students and six faculty members. Provisional accreditation by the American Bar Assn. — which certifies that a school has been evaluated on the quality of its legal education and allows students to sit for the bar exam in any state — is at least two years away.

But by teaching law from a Christian perspective, Falwell hopes to train a cadre of Christian lawyers to fight what he sees as the growing secularization of public life across the country.

And the school plans to offer select students hands-on experience with a law firm that takes on constitutional issues. That would occur when Liberty Counsel, a legal organization in Orlando, Fla., that focuses on cases involving religion and traditional values, moves its legislative arm to the campus.

Best known for establishing in 1979 the Moral Majority, one of the first evangelical efforts to affect political discourse, Falwell sees the law school as an extension of his mission.