By Ashley McGuire
Among the crop of newly elected men and women headed to the Senate in 2019, one stands out for his record on religious liberty.
Former Missouri Attorney General and Senator-elect Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) strong track record defending America’s first freedom can be traced all the way to the beginnings of his career.
Fresh out of Yale Law School, Hawley clerked for judge Michael McConnell, a religious liberty giant. McConnell, who has been called “one of the preeminent legal minds on religious liberty,” has argued some of the most important religious freedom cases to come before the Supreme Court in recent years and helped to found Stanford Law School’s religious liberty clinic. Judge McConnell surmised that Hawley applied to work with him because of his writings on the issue of religious liberty. “His interest in this goes way back to law school if not before,” McConnell said in an interview. “That shows a considerable dedication to that issue.”
