John Witte Jr. is Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics, director of the Law and Religion Program and director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta. He specializes in legal history, marriage and religious liberty.

His books include Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties (Westview Press, 2004), which includes discussion of the 19th-century Mormon polygamy cases, and From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion and Law in the Western Tradition (Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).

He has written that if the basis for reforming marriage laws becomes social pragmatism and individual happiness, "then arguments against incestuous, adolescent and polygamous marriages must also fall aside."

Contact: 404-727-6980 or 404-727-5588

E-mail: jwitte@law.emory.edu,

Alternate Contact: April Bogle, the center's public relations director, 404-712-8713

E-mail: abogle@law.emory.edu.