Professor Michael J. Perry

University Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law and Peace Studies

Professor Michael J. Perry, USD’s Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law and Peace Studies, will deliver a public presentation entitled, “Secular Worldviews, Religious Worldviews and the Morality of Human Rights” on October 28 at 6:00PM in the Joan B. Kroc Peace & Justice Theatre. Professor Perry will address the ways that some religious views support the morality of human rights and will consider whether secular views can support that morality. To RSVP for the presentation, please click here.

Professor Perry is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on constitutional rights law and theory. He teaches a course in International Human Rights open both to law students and to students in the newly founded Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies and teaches a second topical class for law students.

In addition to his expertise in constitutional rights, Perry is a widely published scholar in the area of law, morality and religion. He holds a Robert W. Woodruff Chair at Emory University, where he teaches in the law school. A Woodruff Chair is the highest honor Emory can bestow on a faculty member.

Perry is the author of ten books, all published by major academic presses, and more than 60 articles and essays. His books include, Love and Power: The Role of Religion and Morality in American Politics (Oxford, 1991), The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford, 1998), We the People: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court (Oxford, 1999), Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy (Cambridge, 2003), Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts (Cambridge, 2007); and Constitutional Rights, Moral Controversy, and the Supreme Court (Cambridge, 2009). His eleventh book, The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy, will be published by Cambridge University Press this year. Perry is presently writing a book titled An Introduction to Human Rights: Morality, Politics, and International Law, to be published by Routledge.

Before moving to Emory, Perry held the Howard J. Trienens Chair in Law at Northwestern University Law School, where he taught from 1982 to 1997, and the University Distinguished Chair in Law at Wake Forest University School of Law, where he taught from 1997-2003.