How Judges Reason

Associate Professor Stephen Mathis is profiled in the Wheaton Quarterly (Winter 2015).

Almost as long as I’ve been teaching the course, I’ve had at least one assignment … that asks the students to read the briefs for an undecided case that has been argued in front of the Supreme Court and to use the jurisprudential theories we’ve studied to decide the case themselves. I try to pick interesting cases, and the high-profile ones like the Hobby Lobby case this past spring tend to be good ones to choose.