Vincent Phillip Muñoz

Tocqueville Professor of Political Science and Concurrent Professor of Law

Office: 2032 Jenkins Nanovic Halls
Phone: 574-631-0489
Email: vmunoz@nd.edu
Website: https://politicalscience.nd.edu/people/vincent-phillip-munoz/

Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Religion & Public Life in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the founding director of Notre Dame's undergraduate minor in Constitutional Studies and directs Notre Dame's Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government.

Muñoz writes and teaches across the fields of constitutional law, American politics, and political philosophy with a focus on religious liberty and the American Founding. His first book, God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson (Cambridge University Press, 2009) won the Hubert Morken Award from the American Political Science Association for the best publication on religion and politics in 2009 and 2010. His First Amendment church-state case reader, Religious Liberty and the American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases and Documents (Rowman & Littlefield) was first published in 2013 (revised edition, 2015) and is being used at Notre Dame and other leading universities.

Muñoz's current project is a scholarly monograph on the natural right of religious liberty and the original meaning of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. Articles from that project have appeared in American Political Science Review, The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Notre Dame Law Review, American Political Thought, and the University of Pennsylvania's Journal of Constitutional Law.

Scholarship

Books

• God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Religious Liberty and The American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases & Documents. Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. revised edition, 2015.

Refereed Journal Articles, Law Review Articles & Refereed Book Chapters 

• "Two Concepts of Religious Liberty: The Natural Rights and Moral Autonomy Approaches to the Free Exercise of Religion," American Political Science Review 110, no. 2 (2016), pp. 369-81. 
• "If Religious Liberty Does Not Mean Exemptions, What Might It Mean? The Founders' Constitutionalism of the Inalienable Rights of Religious Liberty," Notre Dame Law Review 91, no. 4 (2016), pp. 1387-1417. 
• "How the Founders Agreed about Religious Freedom but Disagreed about the Separation of Church and State," with Kevin Vance, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S., ed. Barbara McGraw (Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), pp. 85-97. 
• "Church & State in the Founding-era States," American Political Thought 4 (2015), pp. 1-38.
• "The Founding Fathers' Competing Visions for the Proper Separation of Church and State" in Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Allen D. Hertzke (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), pp. 53-68.
• "Introduction," in Religious Liberty and The American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases & Documents, ed. Vincent Phillip Muñoz (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Litttlefield, 2013), pp. 1-12.

Areas of Expertise

• American Constitutional Law
• Church & State