Faith on Wall Street, Compartmentalization, and Authentic Legal Practice with Brett Scharffs

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today, I'm starting a new series in the podcast, and I'm speaking with lawyers who bring their faith and personal conviction into their legal work. These are some honest conversations about how values and true religious identity and belief shape decisions, careers, and views of justice across different practice areas and countries. My goal is simple. It's to explore what it really looks like to be a lawyer who brings their whole self to work. To start these conversations and this series, I'm having as today's guest Professor Brad Sharps. He's a leading scholar in law and religion and the director of the International Centre for Law and Religious Studies at Brigham Young University. His work focuses on religious freedom, national law, and the role of human dignity in legal systems around the world. He has thought and spoken in dozens of countries, contributed extensively to scholarship in this field, and continues to engage with global institutions, including conversations at the United Nations on how law, faith, and human rights intersecting practice. Thank you so much for making the time to be here today, Professor Sheriffs. Thank you, Claudia. It's a pleasure to see you. Again, absolutely. Thank you for making the time and just start your conversation today. I I'd love for you to introduce yourself to your listeners that was a little bit more about yourself and if we can start as well hearing about your journey a little bit, if you can take us back on, when did you first start to be interested in this, the intersection of law and religious freedom or law and religion? My father taught at the university level and one of the subjects he taught was world religions. So I grew up in a home where there was an interest in world religions. My undergraduate studies was at Georgetown University and while I was a business major, I had a minor in theology. And Georgetown is a Catholic Jesuit university. And I really fell under the spell of the Jesuit priest dinner. And while I was at Georgetown a studying theology, I took a lot of courses in in world religions again and I found it very interesting. From there I shifted gears and studied philosophy for a while. I earned 2 masters degrees in philosophy and then went to law school. And at law school I found myself once again really interested in religion, this time law and religion. At Yale Law School we had to write a mini thesis and mine was on a Supreme Court issue involving law and religion and then worked as a law clerk for a couple years, practice law and then began teaching at Brigham Young University. And there I met a professor named Cole Durham who was a scholar focusing on law and religion and I began teaching classes with him. And a couple late I couple of years later, the International Centre for Law and Religion Studies was created BYU. That was January 1st, 2000. He was the founding director of that centre and I began working with him. And over the years the amount of work I did intensified. I became an associate director of that centre, focused mostly on Asia and I worked extensively in that area for a number of years. And then about 10 years ago, in May of 2016, I became director of the centre. And so it has become a significant part of my professional life. I'm still a professorial professor at BYU. I still have all of the responsibilities of a regular professor, But in addition to that, I the director of a small centre that focuses on law and religion. Globally amazing. And thank you so much for for taking the time to explore a little bit about your story. I think that's so interesting of how many ways law and religion have really intersected in your career. And, and I'm curious as well, you know, in your experience, how has your personal faith also shaped the way you see these issues? So when you think about law, justice and your role as a legal scholar. Well, I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I grew up in the faith and my family traces its history back to the very early pioneers. And so this is a faith tradition that suffered persecution but is largely accepted, as, you know, regular part of society today. And so we've experienced persecution, but we've also experienced the journey from persecution to inclusion. But I think we have a heart for the persecuted because we've experienced it recently enough. And occasionally we still experience misunderstanding or discrimination. And so we have sort of a sensitivity to others who are earlier in that journey or who are suffering discrimination or persecution around the world. And so that may be one reason why this is a subject matter that is of natural interest to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And so at BYU, it's a really easy place to have a centre that focuses on law and religion studies because it's a university and a church that is part of the history, is part of the theology, It's part of the core collective memory that religious freedom is really important. Amazing, as I was preparing for this podcast and frankly, we've we've met in the past and I've, I've seen some of your scholarship and I've seen that you've written about ideas like humility, legal reasoning, and law as the craft. So how do your beliefs influence the way you approach these in your teaching and in your scholarship? Well, thank you for noticing that, Claudio. The first article I wrote as a law professor was called The Role of Humility in Exercising Practical Wisdom. At Yale Law School. I was a research assistant for a professor I really admired named Anthony Kronman, and he was working on a book called The Lost Lawyer about the legal profession. And in that book, his basic argument was that to be a good lawyer you needed two capacities, the capacity of sympathy and the capacity of detachment. And he compared it to bifocal lenses that you needed to be able to have an up close capacity to see people with genuine sympathy. I thought the word was empathy. He and I had a big argument about that. But in any event, the other was detachment, which was the ability to pull back, not overly identify with your clients interest and exercise detached judgment. And as I thought about it, it seemed to me that in order to be able to toggle back and forth between sympathy and detachment, the key virtue that you needed, I had been studying Aristotle. So I really believed in virtue as the key element of a character was humility. And so I thought of the passage in Micah, It's a Micah 68 where it says, what does the Lord require of thee? And the answer is to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. And so to my mind, sympathy lined up with mercy and detachment lined up with justice. And that missing ingredient of humility is what you needed to complement mercy and justice. And of course, mercy and justice are recognized as the two great legal values. And then we think of mercy and justice as being in conflict with each other. And sometimes they are. And so to my mind, I began thinking that in order to navigate the competing claims of mercy and justice, the key virtue we need, the character of trait we need as lawyers, as humility. And so that was my very first article. And of course, in a way, well, in a very deep way, it was motivated by my relating my reading of a religious tax. And so from the very beginning of my career as a law professor, I was thinking about these really important jurisprudential questions through a lens that included religious perspectives. Fantastic. Well, that that's quite impressive that right right at the beginning you had that intersection. Thinking about this series and and preparing for this episode, I've I've realized that more and more I see that lawyers may face some kind of tension between their personal conviction and professional expectations. I see that sometimes different organizations try also if you incentivize bigger corporations to to really have that place for faith at work. I see many initiatives happening, especially in the US in regards to that. But I'm curious if you have ever experienced or navigating, if you ever experienced or navigated that in your own career where there was any kind of tension between a personal conviction and especially in your faith and a professional expectation? Well, I'm friends with a a scholar named Brian Graham who runs the Faith and Business Foundation, and that's a big part of his work, is trying to promote the idea of bringing your whole person to work, including your faith. I'm not sure I'm entirely on board with that because sometimes I think it's in our lives that when we're at work, I think it's OK for us to have a professional persona that doesn't include all of us. I think sometimes we leave elements of our family life at home. We don't bring all of our family troubles with us to work. We don't leave all of our hobbies with us when we go to work. We don't leave all of our fascination with sports with us when we go to work. I mean, there may be occasions where we talk about it around the water cooler, but I think it's OK for us to have some element of compartmentalization. I was a lawyer at a Wall Street law firm called Sullivan and Cromwell. And what impressed me about that firm was there were people from all different kinds of backgrounds. And all that mattered was, could you do the work? The coin of the realm was as an associate, were you well regarded or not? And whether you were well regarded was whether you could deliver. One of the things that was unique about Sullivan and Cromwell is no one put their diplomas on the wall. Now, I had a a pretty impressive educational background. If people were hanging their diplomas on the wall, my set of diplomas would look pretty good. But I would not have dared put my diploma on the wall. No one told me not to, but there was not an attorney in the firm that had their diploma on the wall at Sullivan and Cromwell. It would never have occurred to me that it was OK to do that. And so I didn't bring my educational pedigree with me to work at Sullivan and Cromwell. Now, on the other hand, I'm a latter day St. And before I got to the Washington, DC office of Sullivan and Cromwell, there had been another latter day St. who had worked there. He had left right before I arrived, but he had lived his faith. He had kept the Sabbath day. And I was assigned to a very intense project. And the senior partner on the project told me, I know you're a latter day St. I know you cannot work one Sunday, but I need you to be here on Saturday until midnight, and I need you to be back early Monday morning. Will you do that? And it was easy for me to say yes. And it was really easy for me because my predecessor had lived the tenants of his faith. And there were observant Jews who took off sundown Friday until a sundown on Saturday. And people at Sullivan and Cromwell were really respectful of religious obligation. But I've never been anywhere where people work harder and longer hours than Sullivan and Cromwell. So believe me, we more than made-up for it in the other expectations that we met. But I was able to lift my faith in that professional environment. Now, other than that, religion never came up. I was never talking about my faith at Sullivan and Cromwell. We didn't have employee resource groups that were talking about religion. And if there had been one, I would have been uncomfortable joining it because faith was just not part of the culture at that law firm. Nor would I have been comfortable joining a hobby group because hobbies were not part of the culture at Sullivan and Cromwell. Sullivan and Cromwell was a place where you went and worked and did the job. And the lawyers at Sullivan and Cromwell were really intense professionals. And then when they weren't working, they left. And what little life they had was their own personal, private life. And so I don't mind not taking my whole self to work. Now today I work at a religiously affiliated university, and so I can talk openly about my faith. And I do so much more today than I did early in my career. So, for example, I teach law and religion, religious freedom. It was only recently that I began thinking I should share a passage of scripture that relates to religious freedom in my class. I've been teaching for 30 years and until the last few years I never did them at a religiously affiliated university. I had been so intensely secularized from my education that even at a religiously affiliated university it never occurred to me that I could do that. And so these days at the beginning of class I just pull out a verse of scripture and it could be something as simple as God created man in his own image and I can tell the class in 2 minutes at the beginning of the hour why I think this is a religious freedom scripture. I found that liberating. And so later in my career, I have found it easier to integrate to my faith into my work. But part of that is the field I work in. And lately in the field of law and religion, I've become more confident integrating my faith openly and fully into my to my work. And I have a lot of really great interfaith friendships. And I think those have been made possible largely because I authentically and visibly live my own faith and hope that others will do the same. And so that has been a valuable part of how I've been able to relate to other people in my field. But my field is the field of religious freedom. And so, you know, that's a pretty specialized. So I think it varies from context to context, Claudio. And the way I could do it at Sullivan and Cromwell was very different than I did it as a young professor and it's different than how I do it now as an older professor in a field that's related to the law and religion. And so I don't think there's a simple one-size-fits-all answer for this. But one thing I've noticed about your generation is authenticity is a value that is much more important than it was to my generation. And so I have come to really admire that about your generation. And so I have tried to be more open and authentic about how I present myself to the world. And I find that easier to do with your generation than it is with the generation that preceded me or my generation. Fantastic. Well, I really appreciate you bringing all this detail and really explaining the different contexts in which you worked. I think that's so important to note that there is no one specific answer of how to live authentically. And I appreciate you mentioning this that that you've noticed that different generations have different points about that. I also know that the centre for which you work has a really interesting program globally. So you frequently interact with global leaders of different faiths, with scholars and and has a really interesting, you have a really interesting overall program going on regarding that truth, this global work and engagement with this different leaders with different legal systems. I'm understanding that most people, most callers are very much connected to the field of law as well. What are some of the things that you've learned about how religious tradition is understood and protected across cultures? So I'm a scholar of law and religion that looks at it from an international law and a comparative law perspective. So my principal expertise is in U.S. law, and U.S. law on law and religion is quite different than most other places in the world because we have an Establishment Clause as well as a free exercise clause, and the Establishment Clause means no state religion. There are a lot of places where there are different church state relationships and some have established churches. And so the international law framework is mostly found in human rights instruments. And so when we focus on law and religion from a human rights perspective, we usually start with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 18 of the Universal Declaration. And then we have enforceable treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. And those conventions are legally enforceable. And the European Convention in particular has a robust body of law of case law that has been decided by the European Court of Human Rights. And then you have comparative constitutional law. And so you have case law which has been decided by the Supreme Court of Canada and the Supreme Court of South Africa and the Supreme Court of, you know, every other country or equivalence to the Supreme Court. And so as scholars, my colleague Cole Durham and I have written a case book on law and religion. And what it does is it has 1/3 of its material on U.S. law, 1/3 on international human rights based law, and 1/3 on comparative constitutional law. And so it will have sort of a half dozen of the important Canadian cases in the book as part of the comparative law section, although it doesn't have extensive materials on Canadian law. But for example, Multani, which is the Canadian sick case about whether you can have a coupon in schools, is a really interesting case. And so we have that and contrast it with other cases involving or other cases involving religious symbols. The schools that are decided either by the European Court of Human Rights or United States Supreme Court. And so that's how we try to approach the study of this field. And for example, if we're brought into a country to help with a law reform project, we don't come in and say just here's how the US does it, you should do it that way. What we try to do is come in and say, here's the problem you're facing. Here is how, you know, half dozen other countries address this problem. Here are the strengths and the weaknesses of those different approaches. And then the people from those countries will solve their own problems for the most part. And our role is to sort of inform them about the range of solutions that others have used. And they will themselves figure out what they want to do. And then we can provide technical help. If they decide, well, we'd like to try to do something similar to what South Africa has done, then we can help them identify, you know, the South Africa law and how it works and maybe help try to adapt it to how it would work in their particular constitutional or legal system. And so from a comparative law perspective, we often talk about how transplants, we use kind of the metaphor of organ transplants in the human body. They often illicit and allergic reaction and a rejection a reaction and you have to be very careful when you're trying to do transplants that you don't elicit A rejection impulse from the the new body. And and for the most part, we're not going to be the best experts on figuring out exactly how to adapt, you know, a solution from another system into a into. But if you look globally, almost every constitution that has been written since 1948 and almost all of the constitutions of the world have been written since 1948 draw heavily upon the human rights instrument. And so there's a lot of consistency across the world on at least constitutional provisions, and they draw heavily upon the international human rights instruments. Fantastic. Well, I really appreciated it that the podcast definitely has a great benefit of having you here as a religious freedom scholar sharing what very much feels like, you know, a very instructional class for everyone. So what a privilege should be hearing from you in the podcast today. Really. Thank you so much. And you've spoken about the importance of human dignity as well. I know there is many different works in which you you have been involved, including the Point of the West Declaration and other works regarding human dignity and the role of religious voices in building peace. So I wanted to know, from your perspective, what does that meaningful engagement with those voices actually look like when it comes to practice? Well, about 8 years ago, we were trying to think of what we could do to help commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So this was all the way back in 2018 and we were brainstorming with Jan Figel, who at the time was the special envoy, the freedom of religion or belief outside the European Union. Now that titles the mouthful. What he was experiencing was a lot of difficulty talking about religious freedom in various places in the world where there were a lot of problems with religious freedom. And he's having an experience in Pakistan in particular that he told us about. And when he shifted the conversation from religious freedom to human dignity, he got a very different reaction from the officials in Pakistan. Instead of sort of a defensive withdrawal, he got an openness where they said Karama dignity. That's a concept in our holy book, the Koran. Why don't you come and we can talk. And so human dignity became a door opener and a bridge builder. And so we began focusing on human dignity. And what we learned is that during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947, early 1948, human dignity really served a very prominent role in facilitating the agreement and the consensus that was generated around the thirty articles that became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And if you look at the first sentence of the preamble of the DHR, if you look at article one of the UDHR, they both begin with human dignity. And so we thought, what if our Era 2 needs a return to that very basic principle to in a way, hit the reset button on human rights, which have become quite politicized and divisive in many ways. And so we held a series of conferences in 2018, culminating in a conference in Punta del Este that resulted in this declaration that you mentioned, the Punta del Este declaration on human dignity for everyone everywhere. This right here is a brochure that emerged from that effort that has gone in and out of dozens of printings that just illustrates that declaration. But out of that effort, at a conference that we helped organize in Africa, there emerged a companion declaration on African Perspectives on Human Dignity. And what was interesting is how different that document was, because it turns out that the way scholars in Africa were thinking about human dignity was quite different than the way that the predominantly Western. We had tried to be very inclusive, but the Punta del Este Declaration discussion nevertheless had been quite Western and academic in its focus. And the African discussion was much richer in a way, and much more diverse and much more grounded in life and reality. And from that declaration, we helped organize a book on African perspectives on human dignity and later a project on Asian perspectives on human dignity. And that project has just resulted in a book that was published in January of this year on Asian perspectives on human dignity. And we're working on a project on Islamic perspectives on human dignity. And we've done one on perspectives from Oceania on human dignity. And this summer at Oxford, we're going to be doing a conference on Indigenous perspectives on human dignity. Now, why all of these different projects? It's not so that we can eventually come to 1 imperial definition of human dignity. It's so that we can listen to each other and learn from each other and get to know each other. Because what we need to do, what human dignity invites us to do, is to see each other deeply and to listen to each other deeply. And it's interesting how thoroughly we have failed to do them, even with the concept of human dignity. So if we truly believed in human dignity, at the very least we would be asking each other, what does human dignity mean to you? And we would be listening to each other. And so if we do that, what does is it helps us learn to value and to see each other deeply as human beings. And if we do that, something important happens it it makes it possible for us to begin solving hard problems. That's why when I was making this presentation to the United Nations Human Rights Council recently, I was pointing out that human dignity was the missing one of two missing elements of their resolution on a human rights culture of peace. Because it's human dignity that was the foundational principle for human rights. And it's human dignity that will allow us to genuinely create cultures of peace. Because if we really see each other and listen to each other deeply, that's where peacemaking will. That's when we have a chance. It's not gonna like work like an algorithm to create peaceful societies, but it gives us a chance to create peaceful societies if we see each other that way, if we listen to each other that way. And so This is why we're working on these multiple projects on human dignity, because we we have failed to do this. And we think it's important that we try. Fantastic, fantastic. So I was actually seeing that in a recent discussion you had mentioned that one of the biggest obstacles to peace would be that people or interests that do not want peace. So I really appreciate you bringing up the idea of how peace, building, human dignity, all of those come together. I find that quite fascinating that we start a conversation about, you know, coming to work, being a person of faith, having a backgrounding law, and then we get to the point of human dignity and peacemaking. It's it's just incredible. I'm curious here. How should lawyers, scholars, policymakers respond to that reality while still holding on to principles like human dignity and justice? So it's easy to be sort of platitudinous and superficial when we talk about these things. And I, I don't want to fall into that pattern, but think it, I think it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning about authenticity. I think that if, if each of us is living the best version of what we truly believe, that's step number one. You know, our centre produced a brochure a few years ago about what you can do to help promote religious freedom and had ten ideas on it. And they were pretty practical things. It was in something network, get to know your neighbors, know there were ideas about, you know, things to read and so forth. And one morning I was, I was actually in the shower and I thought to myself, I had one of those light bulb moments. And I don't have those very often, but I actually had a, a light bulb moment and it was, it was like this insight that once you have it, you can't unhack it. And it was the most important thing you can do to promote religious freedom is to live your own faith in its best version. And to me, that seems so obvious now that it occurred to me or that it it came to me and I looked at my list, our list, and it was nowhere to be found. And I felt foolish because that seems to me to be so obvious that the most important thing we can do if we want to promote religious freedom is live the best version of our faith. Because why do we value religious freedom? It's because of the good that religion does in the world and the good that religion does in the world. The best way for people to see and appreciate that is if I'm a religious person and they see me living a religious life and they say that is something we should encourage. That is not something that is dangerous. That is not something that is to be suppressed or to be marginalized. That is something that we want to be transmitted to the next generation. And so lately I've been talking much more about the virtues of religious freedom. What kind of people will we inculcate if we value religious freedom? What are the virtues of the head, the heart and the hand that will inculcate if we value religious freedom? And I think those are real. But the most important thing we can do to integrate faith into our professional lives, I believe, is just live the best version of our faith and to do it not obnoxiously. I have a friend, Judge Thomas Griffith, who has a cartoon that I believe came out of The New Yorker. And it's a person who's before the bar of Saint Peter. And Saint Peter is saying, yes, yes, yes, you were a good Christian, but did you have to be so obnoxious about it? And he uses that as an example of the wrong way to live your faith. And so, you know, I think we can and should live our faith out loud, but we should live the best versions of our faith. And the best versions of our faith are not going to be obnoxious, let alone noxious. And there are certainly versions of each of our faith traditions that are appalling. And those versions of our faith traditions ought not to be lived out loud. And, you know, they can be dangerous. And we see examples of that on on often both sides of conflicts, both historical and contemporary. And so it's not that, you know, faith is an unadulterated good, but the best versions of nearly every faith I'm familiar with is very good. So for most of us, living the best version of our faith is probably the best thing we can. Do fantastic. No, I really appreciate that and I think that there really ties in with what I'd like to wrap up this episode asking you. You mentioned a little bit about your personal experience and after all these years, you know, probably seeing many other examples of how people leave their faith throughout their legal career. I wouldn't you ask you for young lawyers who might be thinking of I want to leave out my faith, my moral convictions in my legal career. Is there any kind of practical advice that you would offer based on that journey? I said earlier, I don't think there's one-size-fits-all in terms of the workplace and how prominently your faith factors in sort of how vocally or transparently outwardly you live your faith. But I believe that being true to your faith is something that we can all do, even if we're not being flamboyant in the way that we do it. I talked about being more confident in, in sharing my faith and manifesting my faith today than I did earlier in my life. But still, I don't do it in ways that are dramatic or showy. To me, the best version of my faith is pretty quiet when it's it's, it's pretty subdued. Now that may be different for other people, but my version of the best version of my faith is a pretty respectful and pretty gentle. And so I'm not a large public manifestations of my faith. I don't mind others who are, you know, more outwardly observant. Certainly, you know, I have a lot of friends who are much more outwardly manifesting their faith than I do and I don't mind that. But it outward manifestation of my faith is pretty quiet, I think. And that is, I think in part due to my faith tradition and probably in part due to who I am as a person. And so again, I think my primary counsel or my primary idea would be to live authentically and to live the best version of what you believe. One of the advantages of interfaith dialogue is that when we put on the table what we believe, we may not convince others that what we believe is true, but we we hold out a marker of what others can expect of us. Because if we say, I believe we are created in the image of God, that gives others a right to expect of me, that I will treat others as if they are created in the image of God. And so that is meaningful even if someone else might say, well, I don't believe we're created in the image of God, but if I believe it, they can have an expectation of me that I live as if I believe it. And so I think if all of us try to live up to what we profess to believe, the world is going to be a much different place. Amazing, I really appreciate you taking the time to come into podcast and to share some about your work, your personal story, and especially your perception of faith and, and how he plays a role in a lawyer's professional life in the legal field. So thank you so much for for coming into the show today. Professor Sharps. Thanks Claudia, and congratulations on this undertaking. I commend you for it and wish you all the best with it. Much appreciated. Thank you all for tuning in and listening to this episode 2.