CURRENT developments in American law suggest, to borrow an elegant phrase from British historian G. R. Elton, that the past has a future. Most present-day lawyers are ahistorical—they think “criminal conversation” is a Mafia tape—but there is a quiet two-front push into antiquity. One features a Roman-law revival: a woman, it is argued, has an inherent right to execute her unborn children. This merely switches plenary power over offspring (potential or actual) from paterfamilias to mater. However, I will leave this exercise in jurisprudential atavism for others; my focus is the second front: the legal capers in the academic world I have inhabited for over 45 years.
Conflicts between secular and religious courts are, except in Orthodox Jewish divorce cases, seldom a source of present-day litigation. Yet for at least a quarter of a century a new ecclesiastical jurisdiction has been eating away at the margins of civil authority. I flagged it in The New Leader and the Times Magazine in 1969-70, but until recently—when it surfaced as the dispute over “Political Correctness” (PC)—nobody has paid much attention to the seizure of normally sec-
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