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John Witte Jr.

Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and CSLR Faculty Director
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Areas of Expertise

Legal History, Human Rights, Religious Freedom, Marriage and Family Law, Law and Religion, Christianity and Law, Legal and Political Theory

Courses

Advanced Religious Freedom, American Legal History, Criminal Law, European Legal History, First Amendment: Religious Freedom, History of Church/State Relations, History of Law, Religion, and Family, Law and Christianity, Religion and State

Biography

John Witte Jr., JD (Harvard); Dr. Theol. h.c. (Heidelberg), is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor of Religion, and faculty director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. A leading specialist in legal history, human rights, religious freedom, marriage and family law, and law and religion, he has published 350 plus articles, 19 journal symposia, and 50 plus books. 

His major books include: Law and Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002); The Reformation of Rights (Cambridge, 2007); Christianity and Law (Cambridge, 2008); The Sins of the Fathers (Cambridge, 2009); Christianity and Human Rights (Cambridge, 2010); Religion and Human Rights (Oxford, 2012); From Sacrament to Contract, 2d ed. (Westminster John Knox, 2012); No Establishment of Religion (Oxford, 2012); The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (Cambridge, 2015); Christianity and Family Law (Cambridge, 2017); Church, State, and Family (Cambridge, 2019); The Blessings of Liberty (Cambridge, 2021); Faith, Freedom, and Family (Mohr Siebeck, 2021); Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 5th ed. (Oxford, 2022); In Defense of the Marital Family (Brill, 2023); Table Talk (Brill, 2024); The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law (Oxford, 2024); and The Legal Foundations of Religious Freedom (Notre Dame Press, 2026). Several of these titles have appeared in sixteen languages.

Witte has delivered more than 450 public lectures throughout the world, including the Franke Lectures at Yale, the Brauer Lectures at Chicago, the Pennington Lectures at Heidelberg, the Jefferson Lectures at Berkeley, the Beatty Lectures at McGill, the Timbers Lectures at Dartmouth, the Meador Lectures at Virginia, the Steinmetz Lectures at Duke, the Cunningham Lectures at Edinburgh, the McDonald Lectures at Oxford, the True Family Lectures at Notre Dame, and the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen.

With $28 million of funding raised from the Pew, Ford, Lilly, Luce, and McDonald foundations, and other benefactors, Witte has directed 20 major international projects on democracy, human rights, and religious liberty; on marriage, family, and children; and on law and Christianity—collectively yielding more than 400 new volumes and journal symposia. He (co)edits Emory Studies in Law and Religion (Eerdmans), Cambridge Elements in Law and Religion, Brill Research Perspectives on Law and Religion, the Spanish Colección Raíces del Derecho (Aranzadi), the Chinese Law, Religion and Culture Series (Bouden House), and the Journal of Law and Religion (Cambridge).

Witte has been elected 12 times as the Most Outstanding Professor in the Law School, and has won dozens of awards and prizes for his teaching and research, including induction into the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation in Spain and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Witte is married to Eliza Ellison, a theologian and mediator. They have two daughters and five grandchildren.

Education: JD, Harvard University, 1985; BA, Calvin College, 1982