Berkley Center

Robert Audi is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Management at the University of Notre Dame with research interests in ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, religious epistemology, and the philosophy of mind and action. He has published 15 books including most recently Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (2011) and The Good and the Right (2005), along with authoring over 200 papers in journals such as International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Journal of Business Ethics, Business and Professional Ethics Journal, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy. He has served as the president of the American Philosophical Association and as general editor of the first and second editions (1995, 1999) of the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. He holds a B.A. from Colgate University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Kyle Duncan was formerly general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he was lead counsel representing Hobby Lobby Stores in its challenge to the HHS mandate. He is now a lawyer in private practice for the firm of Schaerr Duncan LLP in Washington, D.C. Kyle was also previously solicitor general of Louisiana from 2008 to 2011, where he argued numerous appeals in state and federal courts, including the US Supreme Court. From 2004 to 2008 Duncan was an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law, where he taught courses on constitutional law, church-state relations, and free speech. He was assistant solicitor general in the Texas Attorney General’s Office from 1999 to 2002. Duncan received a J.D. from Louisiana State University in 1997 and an LL.M. From Columbia Law School in 2004; he clerked under Judge John M. Duhe, Jr. at the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

W. Cole Durham, Jr. is emeritus professor of law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School of Brigham Young University, where he held the Susa Young Gates University Professorship. He is also founding director of the Clark Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies (ICLRS) and president of the G20 Interfaith Association. He has been heavily involved in comparative law scholarship, with a special emphasis on comparative constitutional law, and is known for his contributions to protecting religious freedoms. He is co-editor of the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion and the Encyclopedia of Law and Religion (2016) and co-author of Law and Religion: National, International and Comparative Perspectives (second ed. 2019) and Religious Organizations and the Law (2024).

Carolyn Evans is the Harrison Moore Professor of Law and the dean of the University of Melbourne Law School. She is also the deputy vice-chancellor and deputy provost at the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies. Evans is an expert on human rights, religious freedom, and the relationship between law and religion. She is the author of Religious Freedom under the European Court of Human Rights (2001) and co-author of Australian Bills of Rights: The Law of the Victorian Charter and the ACT Human Rights Act (2008). She holds a doctorate from Oxford University.

Thomas F. Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, an NGO committed to achieving worldwide acceptance of religious liberty. Farr is also a senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. From 2006 to 2018 he was an associate professor of the practice of religion and world affairs at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at the Berkley Center; during 2017 and 2018 he was director of the Religious Freedom Research Project and from 2011 to 2016 director of the Religious Freedom Project, both at the Berkley Center. After a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service—which included teaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy, serving as an advisor during U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and leading an interagency task force on verification provisions for the START II Treaty—Farr served as the first director of the U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2003.

Silvio Ferrari is a professor of canon law at the University of Milan and a professor of church-state relations at the University of Leuven in Belgium. An expert on the legal status of Islam in Europe, Ferrari is also the president of the International Consortium for Law and Religious Studies. In the past, he has served as a visiting professor in Paris and worked for numerous international organizations, including the European Union and the Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe. Additionally, he founded, with the assistance of other professors, the European Consortium for Church and State Research. His main areas of interest include law and religion in West Europe, comparative law of religions, and relations between Israel and the Vatican.

Leslie C. Griffin is the William S. Boyd Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law. Griffin is author of Law and Religion: Cases and Materials (4th edition, 2017) and Practicing Bioethics Law (2015). She holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Michael Kessler is executive director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, a professor of the practice of moral and political theory in the Department of Government, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law. Kessler’s research and writing focus on theology, philosophical and religious ethics, and social, political, and legal theory. He is interested in problems of law and religion, both globally and in the U.S. constitutional context. Kessler is the author of several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology, co-edited with Shaun Casey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Political Theology for a Plural Age (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Mystics: Presence and Aporia, co-edited with Christian Sheppard (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He also wrote “Engaging Religion in U.S. Foreign Affairs,” a chapter in the Companion to Religion and Politics in the United States (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Kessler is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.