10/08/04--Boston College Law School is proud to announce that Dean John H. Garvey has been awarded the 2004 Alpha Sigma Nu Jesuit Book Award for Professional Studies for his work Religion and the Constitution. This award is given to honor scholarly achievements made by faculty and administrators of the many Jesuit colleges and universities across the globe.

“Religion and the Constitution is without doubt the best and most important book available today for teaching the law of religious liberty to students,” said Douglas Laycock, the Associate Dean for Research and Alice McKean Young Regents Chair in Law for the University of Texas. “It is both broad and deep, thorough, insightful, balanced, and well written -- a pleasure to teach.”

Religion and the Constitution was co-authored by Michael W. McConnell (United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit) and Thomas C. Berg (University of St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis) and was originally published in 2002.

A total of four Alpha Sigma Nu Awards were given out in 2004. In addition to Dean Garvey’s book, award winners included Manoj S. Patankar’s Risk Management and Error Reduction in Aviation Maintenance, Gary L. Atkins’ Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging, and T. Alexander Aleinikoff’s Semblances of Sovereignity: The Constitution, The State, and American Citizenship.

Dean Garvey attended college at Notre Dame (1970) and law school at Harvard (1974). Upon graduation from law school he clerked for Irving R. Kaufman on the Second Circuit. He later served as Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States, and taught at Kentucky, Michigan, and Notre Dame before coming to Boston College in 1999. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Danforth Foundation.

Dean Garvey is the author of influential textbooks on constitutional theory and the first amendment, including (with T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Daniel A. Farber) Modern Constitutional Theory: A Reader (5th ed), and What Are Freedoms For?