The scene resembles that in many a law-school classroom: two dozen earnest third-year students in jeans and flannel shirts sit at desks, their notebooks open in front of them. Behind the podium where assistant professor Lynne Marie Kohm stands, a sign on the blackboard advertises a bar-exam cram course. But the discussion of the topic at hand, divorce, is not limited to the standard legalisms of family law-custody, property, visitation. Instead, the students here at the Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Virginia, return, again and again, to the spiritual consequences for parents and children. "We can act as healers," one student points out. Kohm agrees, then adds, "One of the things we can do as Christ's attorneys is be the guardian ad litem for the children."
One, but certainly not all. For suddenly it seems that Christ's attorneys are turning up everywhere, from school-board meetings to the Supreme Court, which last week heard a major case on the separation of church and state. Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, which involves the denial of student-activity funds to Wide Awake, a Christian magazine, attracted a slew of amicus briefs on both sides. One of those supporting Ronald Rosenberger and his fellow Christian students was filed by a legal foundation, housed at Regent Law School, called the American Center for Law and Justice, or ACLJ. It is one of a rapidly growing network of Christian legal organizations around the country that have adopted the techniques of liberal activism developed by such groups as the ACLU and the naacp Legal Defense and Educational Fund to do the Lord's work. They are fed by a much smaller number of law schools that teach jurisprudence with what Pat Robertson, founder of Regent and ACLJ, calls "biblical underpinnings.''
The Regent Law School, which opened in 1987, is the largest. This year a crop of 335 students is being trained in what the catalog describes as "God's perspective on law"-an informal mix of traditional scholarship, Bible study and evangelical strategy. Regent students may not be getting the best legal education available-the percentage of the school's students who passed the July 1994 Virginia bar exam was the lowest in the state, and the institution is still only provisionally accredited by the American Bar Association-but they are receiving training that Robertson believes is essential. Himself a 1955 graduate of Yale Law School who failed the New York bar exam and never practiced, Robertson says the problem with his legal education was that "I wasn't sure what the purpose of life was, or what I could do with the truths I was learning." At the Regent Law School (one of seven graduate schools that make up Robertson's 17-year-old Regent University) "students are highly motivated to contribute to mankind, thanks to a deep faith in God.''