Richard W. “Rick” Garnett is the Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corp. Professor of Law and a Concurrent Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Outside of the classroom, Garnett founded and serves as director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society. He is also a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government.
Recently, Garnett was honored with an invitation to join the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, a prestigious scholarly organization that honors members for their “outstanding scholarly excellence and intellectual courage.” Two other Notre Dame professors, fellow law professor Paolo Carozza and the Department of Theology's Gary Anderson, received this honor alongside Garnett. This latest award for Garnett offered an occasion for the CCCG to sit down for an interview with this longtime affiliate of the Center.
Our conversation began by discussing Garnett’s background and career path. Although he was born outside of Philadelphia, Garnett grew up in Alaska, where his father worked as an attorney. Garnett emphasized the role of this experience in bringing him to the law: “I was familiar with law as a career when I was growing up because of my father.”
Garnett left Alaska to study at Duke University, where he decided to pursue a course of study in philosophy with a focus in medieval philosophy. “I wrote an honors thesis on natural law theory, and the philosophy of law more generally, which led me to think that I might want to be an academic,” Garnett explained.
Before he began pursuing this desire to be an academic, however, Garnett decided to take some time to work with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in San Francisco. “I was working for an agency that did a lot of criminal justice issues, such as criminal justice reform or assistance to indigent people,” Garnett recalled, “which confirmed my desire…to go to law school.”
Garnett then attended Yale Law School, where he pursued his interest in becoming an academic “both by doing a lot of academic writing and also digging into some criminal law related topics.” Garnett also clerked for the late Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Richard S. Arnold, and the late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William H. Rehnquist.
Following law school, Garnett practiced law in Washington, DC, with Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin until “somewhat out of the blue,” the Dean of Notre Dame Law School at the time invited him and his wife Nicole to South Bend to interview. “I didn't have any Notre Dame connections,” Garnett said, “but my wife and I really loved the place…Notre Dame hired us, and we've been very happy here ever since.”
Garnett, generally speaking, has taught classes surrounding criminal or constitutional law since arriving at Notre Dame. He has also occasionally taught a constitutional law class for undergraduates in the past.
Of these courses, Garnett’s favorite is his first-year criminal law class. “I think the issues that come up in criminal law are fascinating, and they're issues that everybody can appreciate,” Garnett explained. Additionally, according to Garnett, “it's a real treat to be able to teach first years because they're new, they're nervous, they're excited… and they do all the work!”
Academically, Garnett’s work has focused primarily on questions surrounding religious liberty law. He is widely regarded as a prominent authority in debates regarding this topic, as well as church-state relations. Garnett is currently focused on a “book length treatment on what is the law, and what should the law be, that polices the boundary between political authority, on the one hand, and non-state authority (including religious authority), on the other.”
After tracing his personal trajectory from his upbringing to his latest scholarship, Garnett then turned his work as the founding director of the Program on Church, State, and Society. A part of Notre Dame Law School, the Program is “a kind of bundle of efforts in the religious liberty space,” hosting a religious liberty clinic, helping with the annual Religious Liberty Summit, and providing programming for students in the law school. The Program also hosts the annual Rice-Hasson Lecture, which welcomes a prominent figure to campus each year on questions relating to church, state, and society, as well as the Murphy Fellowship, which recruits and financially rewards high achieving law school applicants who are interested in questions of church-state relations.
“These initiatives are important because there are a lot of ways to pursue these issues outside of just working in a law school or working for a nonprofit,” Garnett remarked. “You can find ways to use the law to advance commitments to religious freedom and commitments to human life in a lot of different areas.”
Lastly, Garnett spoke about what his recent honor from the American Academy of Science and Letters means to him. Regarding the award, Garnett admitted that he feels “a little out of his depth” with such a recognition but nonetheless regards it as a “great honor” to be admitted into the Academy.
But Garnett does not see such success taking him and his wife away from their current positions. Garnett closed by speaking of their “love” for Notre Dame and their plans to stay here to continue their work. “We believe very strongly in Notre Dame's distinctive Catholic character,” he said, “and that's the reason we're here. Notre Dame matters, Notre Dame is important, and for us, it's been a big part of our professional vocation to feel like, not only are we doing our own scholarship, but we are also working towards the university's broader mission.”
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