About Carl H. Esbeck

Professor Carl H. Esbeck has published widely on religious liberty and church-state relations, as well as federal remedies for constitutional wrongs. He took the lead in recognizing that the modern U.S. Supreme Court has applied the establishment clause, not as an individual right but as a structural limit on the government’s authority in explicitly religious matters. This paradigm shift better explains the Court’s relaxed rules on standing with respect to claims under the establishment clause, why the clause is enforced categorically rather than by the balancing that goes with strict scrutiny, provides a remedy for nonreligious wrongs, and is helping to recover notions of church autonomy in an otherwise growing regulatory environment.

Professor Esbeck is recognized as the progenitor of “charitable choice,” an integral part of the 1996 Federal Welfare Reform Act (see 42 U.S.C. § 604a). That legislation was later made a part of three additional federal welfare programs during the Clinton Administration. He followed up that effort by assisting in the promulgation of equal-treatment regulations during the Bush Administration. Professor Esbeck continued to work with President Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships concerning such matters as the right of social-service providers to employ person of like-minded faith. Most recently, he worked to shape the Nine-Agency Partnerships with Faith-Based and Neighborhood Organizations amending regulations promulgated during the Biden Administration.

While on leave from 1999 to 2002, Professor Esbeck directed a public interest law firm, The Center for Law & Religious Freedom, and he then served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. While directing the Center, he was part of a small advocacy team at the Senate which led to passage of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). While at the Department of Justice he worked on first amendment matters generally, and one of his duties was to direct a task force to remove barriers to the equal-treatment of faith-based organizations applying for social-service grants.

Professor Esbeck taught classes to first-year students in Civil Procedure, the survey course in Constitutional Law to second-year students, and electives in Federal Civil Rights Litigation, Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations, and the Madisonian Constitution.

Educational Background

• BS, Iowa State University, '71
• JD, with distinction, Cornell University, '74