Our Students
Ross Astoria
Year: Advanced to Candidacy (ABD) - JSP
Education:Ph.D - Jurisprudence and Social Policy; University of California, Berkeley; May 2010
J.D. - University of California, Berkeley; May 2006
M.A. - Philosophy; Arizona State University, Tempe; May 2001
B.A./B.S. - English/Mathematics; Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University, Blacksburg; May 1999
Law and Religion
Jurisprudence
Law and Philosophy
Articles Editor, Ecology Law Quarterly, 2004-2005
Awards:University Graduate Scholarship, 1999-2001
Prosser Prize, Law and Modern Social Thought
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Instructor of Record
- Diablo Valley College, Department of Political Science, Spring, 2009
Introduction to Political Theory: A survey course of political theory from Protagoras to Nozick.
- Arizona State University, Department of Philosophy, Fall 2001
Business Ethics: A course applying ethical theories to business concerns.
Principles of Sound Reasoning: A course on propositional logic and the informal fallacies.
LEGAL EXPERIENCE
Law Clerk: responsible for preparing briefing at the Law Offices of Stephen Volker, January-July 2005.
My dissertation examines the recent and continuing confrontation between governmental displays of the Decalogue (“The Ten Commandments”) with the Establishment Clause of the Federal Constitution. In its three parts, I advance three analogous claims about how these confrontations operate both to construct symbolic meanings of the Decalogue and to erect a public forum for the production of a particular secular consciousness. First, I argue that the U.S. Supreme Court’s relevant constitutional doctrine (the Lemon and Endorsement Tests) has erected a deliberative forum in the courts in which the Decalogue can take on certain meanings that make it a particularly defensible symbol, unlike other common Christian symbols such as the cross and the crèche. This dynamic allows legal activists to present the Decalogue to the judiciary as a secular heuristic for the reorganization of positive law during the Protestant Reformation, a claim that, if accepted by a court, leads to a conclusion that governmental displays of the Decalogue are constitutional. Second, I argue that the Supreme Court, through both its doctrine and its activity, similarly structures the deliberative forum of legislative bodies. Based on my extensive examination of two counties in Tennessee that elected to display the Decalogue, I conclude that in these forums the Decalogue took on symbolic meanings that enable supporters to present it as a counteractant to the perceived, pernicious activity of the U.S. Supreme Court. In such a role, the Decalogue becomes symbolic of the Transcendent Moral Law: simple, prohibitive, commonsensical, and universal. Finally, I argue that these public, deliberative forums operate as sites for the production and reproduction of a certain type of consciousness, which I designate as “secular,” and whose primary feature is the balkanization of secular beliefs and attitudes from religious beliefs and attitudes, along with the assignment to the latter of a specific function within the psychological economy of the individual – that of a prophylactic against nihilism.
Religious faith and practice are never completely insulated from politics and society. Nowhere is this more evident than in cases where the government publicly displays the Decalogue. My dissertation makes a unique contribution to the scholarly literature by detailing three ways that the U.S. Supreme Court operates to mold religious belief and practice into a certain form.
