Founders' First Freedom Sponsors Trans-Atlantic Conference on Religious Liberty in Switzerland

The four-day gathering in blended collegial debate with practical strategy as jurists and scholars compared U.S. and European paths on religious-freedom law.

SAINT-LÉGIER, Switzerland — Over the course of four summer days, the quiet grounds of Pepperdine University’s Château d’Hauteville sounded more like a courthouse than a vineyard. From June 10 to 13, the Caruso School of Law convened 92 judges, scholars and advocates for a double-header program: the Fourth Nootbaar Fellows Workshop and the inaugural State of Religious Freedom Conference. The combined gathering unfolded inside lecture halls carved out of an eighteenth-century estate that the University bought in 2019 and reopened in 2023 after a full, donor-funded restoration. The campus now offers 58,547 square feet of academic and residential space and 90 acres of orchards, vineyards and forest overlooking Lake Geneva.

The agenda paired trans-Atlantic perspectives at nearly every turn. Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia and Andrea Simoncini of the University of Florence set the tone by contrasting recent Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights opinions. A follow-on session put Ninth Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay next to Irish appellate Judge Ann Power to parse how conscience claims fare in common-law and civil-law courts. Former U.S. solicitors general Paul Clement and Noel Francisco then joined former Strasbourg judge Paulo Pinto de Albuquerque to map the arguments likely to dominate the next Supreme Court term — and to surface European precedents that might shape them.

Concurrent panels broadened the conversation. Workplace accommodation law drew Elizabeth Sepper of Texas, Christopher Lund of Wayne State, Javier Martínez-Torrón of Complutense University of Madrid and Lord Justice James Dingemans of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. Mark Storslee of Emory, Jessie Hill of Case Western Reserve and Louis-Léon Christians of the Université Catholique de Louvain tackled church-state boundaries, while Georgetown’s Stephanie Barclay and Brigham Young’s Frederick Gedicks examined governance questions for faith-based instutions.

Founders’ First Freedom, a California nonprofit involved in promoting liberty of conscience, provided principal funding for the Swiss move after sponsoring last year’s pilot version in Malibu. “Bringing people together from different backgrounds in amazing environments is something that Pepperdine excels at,” said Michael Peabody, the group’s president. “Founders’ First Freedom is pleased to participate in this event and looks forward to future collaborations that advance liberty of conscience.”

The event was organized by The Ken Starr Institute for Faith, Law and Public Service, newly launched to oversee Pepperdine’s public-interest portfolio, and Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

Dean Paul Caron thanked sponsors and faculty for “the work of a preeminent global Christian university” and told attendees that Pepperdine intends to keep religious-liberty scholarship “at the center of legal education.” Michael Helfand, the Brenden Mann Foundation Chair in Law and Religion, called the twin conferences “a commitment to serious, rigorous academic inquiry into the meaning and future of religious freedom,” while Danny DeWalt, Pepperdine’s senior vice president for global impact, said the format reflects a broader institutional push to stage “world-changing conversations” at the Château. pepperdine.edu

Panelists emphasized how rapidly American precedent has moved. In Groff v. DeJoy (2023) the Supreme Court told employers they must prove “substantial increased costs” before turning down a Sabbath request, discarding decades of de-minimis analysis. The Court’s unanimous rulings in Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021) and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022) further strengthened protection for faith-based services and private religious expression. Europe, speakers noted, still reaches for proportionality balancing, which leaves governments broader room to regulate when public-order concerns arise.

That divergence, several practitioners said, shapes everything from discovery strategy to expert selection. American briefs now revolve around whether a rule is the least-restrictive means available, often supported by cost spreadsheets and agency manuals. European counsel, by contrast, supply sociological data and comparative-law surveys aimed at showing that a restriction lands unevenly or without justification. Many predicted that cross-pollination will blur those lines: U.S. advocates citing European “living-together” scholarship on pluralism, and European lawyers borrowing American narrow-tailoring language.

“This week showed that the questions keep multiplying,” Peabody said. “Our goal now is to keep the momentum, and the conversation, moving.”

er.