Meaning and Peace: The Story of Stanford’s Religious Liberty Clinic
James A. Sonne May/June 2025Law students help pioneer a renewed understanding of religious liberty for polarized times.
In January 2013, we launched at Stanford Law School our nation’s then-only Religious Liberty Clinic. A law school clinic is an academic program in which students learn the practice and profession of law through faculty-supervised legal representation of clients in the field. And, as our name expresses, we provide this education and service exclusively in support of clients who face suffering on account of their religion or in seeking to freely practice it.
At its founding, the Stanford Law School Religious Liberty Clinic was the topic of significant public attention, with coverage in the legal, academic, religious, and wider press—including a feature in the New York Times. On a professional level, the attention made sense. After all, Stanford’s standing as one of the world’s best law schools, together with a growing recognition in legal circles of the educational and practical value of aspiring lawyers “learning by doing,” made our launch noteworthy. Beneath the surface, however, our subject matter seemed the bigger draw, and arguably caused the greater stir—namely, in our program’s mission to deliver high-profile advocacy for religious liberty at a time when such liberty has, in the minds of many, become synonymous with political, ideological, or cultural polarization.
Despite any controversy at our founding, however, I’m proud to report that the Stanford Clinic has been a resounding success—and for reasons that demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion in some quarters, religious liberty is a solution to, rather than a cause of, division.
We’ve enrolled and taught more than 200 students of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints—including conservatives, progressives, believers of all stripes, and those who aren’t religious at all. We’ve served nearly 100 clients from more than 20 faith traditions, with appearances as lead counsel in state and federal agencies and courts across the country. And our alumni are taking their place in top law firms, nonprofit organizations, and judicial clerkships—including with justices at the U.S. Supreme Court appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents. Perhaps most affirming of all, we’ve helped inspire at least six other elite American law schools to found similar clinics on their campuses.
In reflecting on the reasons for our program’s success, my mind goes most immediately to the daily and indispensable contributions of our brilliant, talented, and enterprising students, staff, and partners. At a more foundational level, though, I’d suggest at least three overlapping dynamics that not only capture these accomplishments but also explain our human-centered story in a transferable and exponentially promising way: experience, universality, and personhood. For not only is each of these reasons rooted in the shared dignity of people, but they all point more broadly to religious liberty as a salutary and uniting force for human flourishing.
First, there’s the abiding importance of our subject. For time out of mind, people and communities have sought and found answers to life’s deepest questions in religion. In their living out these answers, however, it’s been nearly as common for religious believers to face tension with those who disagree, misunderstand, or even at times stand in outright opposition to them. Rare is the society or point in history that this tension hasn’t been seen or experienced—and often to tragic effect, particularly when there are disparities of power, bigotries, or other accelerants.
To be sure, religious liberty is not unlimited. Nor are religious choices immune from critique. But the story of human beings seeking to peacefully live, worship, and serve in accordance with their deeply held religious beliefs—even to the point of great suffering—is a powerful and persistent reality. By telling that story at the Stanford Clinic, while seeking to understand and make space for people and communities of all faiths to exercise their beliefs in freedom and mutual respect, we resonate with the lived experience of nearly any background or perspective.
During the past 12 years, we’ve highlighted the suffering of working-class religious minorities who face discrimination on the job or the unjust denial of reasonable accommodations there, which forces them to choose between their faith and livelihood. We’ve spoken to the plight of inmates who are refused the ability to practice their faith as a critical (and proven) form of reconciliation and rehabilitation in prison. And we’ve protected ministries to poor, homeless, and migrant individuals against political or other barriers to those manners of support and love to the vulnerable as a religious calling. Through it all, we’ve shown that religious liberty commonly involves—and requires increased attention to—the daily struggle of ordinary people seeking to live, work, and serve in a manner consistent with who they are as human beings.
Second, and relatedly, the Stanford Clinic—and the movement it has inspired—teaches and advocates for religious liberty as a universal right. In other words, religious liberty is not the coveted possession of only one faith, perspective, or worldview. Nor is it a tool particular to a given belief, policy, structure, or moment. Rather, religious liberty is a shared value rooted in our common dignity and in associated norms of pluralism, equality, and toleration. As one of our students told a reporter at our founding: “We’re a religious liberty clinic, not a religion clinic; . . . the controversies might change, but the principle remains.”
Of course, a powerful corollary of the principle of universal religious liberty—that we represent everyone because it’s the right thing to do—is that we’re able to provide a welcoming home to clients and students of all perspectives and faiths (or no faith). This, in turn, not only affirms and enriches the lives of those with whom we work, it also enables us to build bridges between and among those who feel strongly about their own beliefs but might not otherwise have occasion to meet—much less work together in a way that requires and celebrates common ground.
Since the clinic’s founding, we’ve represented clients from nearly every major faith tradition—including Buddhists, Catholics, evangelical and mainline Protestants, Falun Gong, Hare Krishnas, Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Messianic Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Orthodox Christians, Orthodox and Reformed Jews, Quakers, Rastafarians, Seventh-day Adventists, and Sikhs. In the process, we’ve been able to witness to struggles and victories that resonate across traditions. Whether it’s our support of the Adventist who was refused work because of her need to observe the Sabbath; the Muslim death-row inmate seeking an imam by his side at his execution; the Jehovah’s Witness objecting to swearing a government loyalty oath; or the Native American community resisting the obliteration of a sacred spiritual site, we witness to and build from universal religious liberty.
The third and final foundational explanation for our program’s success—and one that again overlaps the others—is that our work begins and ends with the human person. As we experienced at the clinic’s founding, many have come to see contemporary religious liberty primarily in political or religious terms, particularly where its exercise might involve more controversial beliefs or practices. And to be sure, discerning the line between the merits of a particular religious belief or commitment and its practice can at times be a nuanced exercise. But through an approach that focuses on understanding, highlighting, and honoring the lived and dynamic experience of ordinary people—clients, students, staff, judges, colleagues, and more—we’ve elevated, broadened, and refreshed the conversation in profound and dynamic ways.
As the founder of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty Seamus Hasson put it: “Even when we can’t agree on who God is, we can and should agree on who we are.” For although we might come to different conclusions in answering the religion question, the need, and therefore the freedom, to seek and abide by that answer is central to human personhood. Teaching and advocating for religious liberty in and through direct service to people and communities in the immediate and varied circumstances of their lives speaks to this shared reality and, to my mind, points more broadly to a model for religious liberty that honors us all.
Our case projects are frequently staffed at any given time by a team of students from diverse perspectives, supervised by faculty of other perspectives, against an opponent and in a system of still more perspectives—and for a suffering client of a whole other perspective. We’ve had Jews and Protestants work with Catholics to protect Native Americans; agnostics and Muslims team up with Mormons to defend Sikhs; and students and faculty from nearly every major religious tradition, or no religious tradition at all, join together to support Adventists. By its nature, our program demands and prizes human collaboration and mutual respect, which, in turn, elevates universal principles and, notably, reduces polarization.
In reflecting on the Stanford Clinic’s founding and development, its inspiration of other programs, and the immediate and deeper reasons for its success, we’ve been honored to witness to the value of teaching and defending religious liberty as a universal right rooted in the person. Looking ahead, we further hope that our vision and methods point to a helpful framework for exploring and advancing religious liberty as a public good in any setting and no matter one’s own worldview or experience. The cause needs it, as does a society that seeks meaning and peace.
Article Author: James A. Sonne
James A. Sonne is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director of its Religious Liberty Clinic.