‘Giant’ in Two Fields

Professor Douglas Laycock, Who Has Made a Significant Impact as a Religious Liberty and Remedies Scholar, Retires

By Melissa Castro Wyatt

DOUGLAS LAYCOCK doesn’t remember all the events surrounding his public high school’s 1963 Christmas assembly. Half a century of appellate litigation, writing and teaching will do that. But he does clearly remember hearing the Christian Nativity story from the Gospel of Luke. And he remembers walking out in protest.

Laycock, who retires from the University of Virginia School of Law in May as perhaps the nation’s preeminent expert on religious liberty—and one of its most effective advocates— said an outspoken atheist he was sitting next to helped him take the plunge.

“He said something like, ‘Let’s just leave,’ and I went with him,” Laycock recalled.

The Supreme Court’s big school prayer cases, Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963, had just come down. Those and other Warren Court cases, along with Perry Mason’s television courtroom dramatics, left an impression on Laycock, who had grown up in Wood River, Illinois, a blue-collar oil refinery town. His father, who had contracted malaria after fighting at Guadalcanal in World

War II, loaded petroleum products on barges on the Mississippi River.

“It was naive, but I thought I was going to argue cases in the Supreme Court and save the world,” Laycock said. “Well, 40 years later I did argue cases in the Supreme Court. I certainly didn’t save the world.”

Laycock’s briefs, oral arguments and frequent congressional testimony on behalf of religious groups have helped reinvigorate the free exercise clause and lay the groundwork for four federal statutes protecting religious liberty.

At times he has been the target of both the left and right in the culture wars, and he has represented both sides in court. At the Supreme Court, he represented the Catholic Archbishop of San Antonio and, in another case, Texas parents and students who objected to prayer at high school football games. His work—and a letter of support he co-authored—built support for the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act, which codified federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriages while protecting the right of religious organizations not to participate in those weddings.

“I could just as well have been a gay-rights lawyer as a religious liberty lawyer,” Laycock mused. “I got pulled into the religious liberty space serendipitously, and of course the gay-rights space was well occupied.”

Still, he wrote amicus briefs supporting both same-sex marriage and religious liberty in the two Supreme Court cases that recognized the rights of married same-sex couples, Obergefell v. Hodges and U.S. v. Windsor. When the Masterpiece Cakeshop case was before the court, John Dao ’19, a student who was active in the LGBT student group Lambda Law Alliance, invited him to address Lambda and the American Constitution Society, to allay the student groups’ concerns about the decision’s potential to hurt the gay rights movement.

Laycock will head off to retirement in Austin, Texas, where his sons and his granddaughter live. He retires as the author of a five-volume collection of his writings on the law of religious liberty, lead counsel in six Supreme Court cases and the author of 35 amicus briefs filed there, and the leading expert on the law of remedies. He literally wrote the book on remedies, too, authoring “Modern American Remedies: Cases and Materials”— a widely used law school textbook that reorganized the way remedies are taught—and “The Death of the Irreparable Injury Rule.” He is currently working as a reporter on the American Law Institute’s “Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies.”

Laycock achieved all this in the role of the “trailing spouse,” following his accomplished wife, Teresa A. Sullivan, as she climbed the ranks of higher education. Ultimately, she served as the eighth president of the University of Virginia.

His dad once told him he couldn’t “keep following that girl around,” and a rural Illinois cousin tried to “console” him after he left private practice so he and Sullivan could teach at the University of Chicago. “He said, ‘It’s OK, Abe Lincoln failed, too,’” Laycock said with a chuckle. “But following that girl around has worked out pretty well.”

He and “that girl” have been “very happily married” for 52 years this June, he said.