E-Mail This Article to a Friend THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT Jerry Falwell’s war on the ACLU BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

This week was the first day of classes at the brand-new Liberty University School of Law, in Lynchburg, Virginia. Liberty is Jerry Falwell’s university. When announcing plans for the law school two years ago, Falwell wrote that he wants to train "conservative warriors" to fight "important battles against the anti-religious zealots at the American Civil Liberties Union."

The ACLU, of course, has its own training camp on the banks of the Charles River. The Harvard Law School alumni running the civil-rights organization include its president, Nadine Strossen, as well as legal director Steven Shapiro, Women’s Rights Project director Lenora Lapidus, and legislative counsel Timothy Edgar.

The Christian right is gearing up to provide future courtroom opponents to those Cambridge liberals, on battlegrounds like school prayer, creationism in school curricula, town-mall Nativities, and same-sex marriage. Virginia is the red states’ answer to Massachusetts; over in Virginia Beach, Regent University School of Law has been offering a "balance of professional legal training and the affirmation of biblical principles" since 1986. It now has 500 students. Liberty Law would not provide information on its first matriculating class, but it did offer at least 50 full scholarships.

The required courses and texts are mostly mainstream, but Liberty’s faculty wear their beliefs on their sleeves — the dean, Bruce W. Green, was previously senior trial attorney for the rabidly anti-gay American Family Association. Contracts is taught by the author of A Biblical Model for Analysis of Issues of Law and Public Policy. The civil-procedure professor penned Christ’s Atonement As the Model for Civil Justice. Another prof has argued for using a "Christian morality test" as a legal standard for determining when to restrict religious activity.

Green himself will teach Foundations of Law, using texts such as God, Man, and Law: The Biblical Principles and Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law. But that’s not so strange, says George Brown, associate dean for academic affairs at Boston College Law School — a Jesuit institution. "We do grapple with our Catholic and Jesuit identity," Brown says. "We are experimenting with the idea of upper-level courses, and possibly creating a center for law-and-religion studies." Indeed, Columbus School of Law at Catholic University of America has several courses on the intersection of religion and law, including Catholic Natural Law Tradition and Catholic Social Teaching and the Law.

Brown also points out that non-religious institutions have their own particular takes on applying the law. Locally, the law schools at Northeastern University and Suffolk University offer a variety of left-leaning courses, with titles like Social Problems and Legal Theory. Bias is in mind of the beholder.

Whether Liberty can fulfill Falwell’s stated dream of producing tomorrow’s politicians and judges remains to be seen — it has yet to gain accreditation, after all. But we might be seeing the beginnings of an ideological rivalry whose disciples will fight it out in courtrooms of the future.