Peter Irons discusses GOD ON TRIAL with Jeffrey Brand May 22, 2007

GOD ON TRIAL: Dispatches from America's Religious Battlefields.
Political activist, draft resister, and civil rights attorney Peter Irons talks with Jeffrey Brand, Dean of the USF Law School.

Tuesday May 22 7:30 pm
At the Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street in Berkeley
$5 at the door; no one turned away for lack of funds.
For information e-mail lewis@litminds.org
This event is organized by LitMinds.org.

Eminent civil rights attorney, draft resister, political activist, and legal scholar Peter Irons will be in conversation with Jeffrey Brand, Dean of the USF Law School, to talk about his new book God On Trial: Dispatches from America's Religious Battlefields. The event will be introduced by Lewis Klausner of LitMinds.org.

Over the past two decades, federal courts have become contentious battlefields in America’s growing religious wars. Since 1989, five momentous court cases testing the principles of separation of Church and State have divided communities—and the nation. Peter Irons, a noted constitutional scholar, lawyer, and author of the bestselling May It Please the Court, provides detailed and penetrating accounts of these cases. He includes first-person monologues from both sides of each case that reveal the passions and rationales at work in these conflicts. Irons shows that when the courts debate issues like the public display of a cross or the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance they founder and drift for lack of clear legal standards.