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John Inazu is Associate Professor of Law and Political Science at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and an affiliate faculty member of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. Professor Inazu’s scholarship focuses on the First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, and related questions of legal and political theory. His first book, Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, 2012), seeks to recover the role of assembly in American political and constitutional thought. He is the special editor of a volume on law and theology published in Law and Contemporary Problems. Professor Inazu’s work is also published in the Cornell Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Illinois Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, and a number of other law reviews and specialty journals.
Professor Inazu is the chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ section on law and religion. In 2014, he was named the law school’s David M. Becker Professor of the Year. In 2014-2015, he will be a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the law faculty, Professor Inazu was a visiting assistant professor at Duke University School of Law and a Royster Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He clerked for Judge Roger L. Wollman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and served for four years as an associate general counsel with the Department of the Air Force at the Pentagon. He received his JD from Duke University and his PhD in Political Science from UNC Chapel Hill.
Asma T. Uddin is an Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan State University College of Law, where she teaches Constitutional Law II and International Human Rights. Her scholarship focuses on religious liberty, constitutional theory, and judicial rhetoric, with particular attention to how courts can use opinion writing to foster depolarization and inclusive constitutional cultures.
Professor Uddin’s publications include When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America’s Fight for Religious Freedom (Pegasus/Simon & Schuster, 2019), The Politics of Vulnerability: Today’s Threat to Religion and Religious Freedom (Pegasus/Simon & Schuster, 2021), and numerous law review articles that apply social science theories to constitutional interpretation and judicial communication. Her recent work has appeared in the William & Mary Law Review, BYU Law Review, Wayne Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review Reflections, and Michigan Journal of Race & Law, among others.
Before joining MSU Law, Professor Uddin was a Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for the Constitution and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America. She has also taught the religious liberty clinic at Harvard Law School. Earlier in her career, she served as Legal Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where she litigated domestic and international cases, including before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Indonesian Constitutional Court.
In addition to her academic work, Professor Uddin is a Fellow with the Aspen Institutes Religion & Society Program and the Freedom Forum Institute. Her research on religious liberty and depolarization has been supported by the Lilly Endowment, Fetzer Institute, Pew Charitable Trusts, and Templeton Religion Trust. She serves on the Board of Advisors for the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative, was a term-member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and served two terms as an expert advisor on international religious freedom to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Professor Uddin also writes widely for public audiences. Her opinion pieces and essays on religion, rights, and political polarization have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Refinery29, Teen Vogue, The Dispatch, and other outlets.
Professor Uddin is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, where she was on The University of Chicago Law Review.