After ten years spent riddling over the intricacies of church/state law from the ivory tower, law professor Jay Wexler decided it was high time to hit the road to learn what really happened in some of the most controversial Supreme Court cases involving this hot-button issue. In Holy Hullabaloos, he takes us along for the ride, crossing the country to meet the people and visit the places responsible for landmark decisions in recent judicial history, from a high school football field where fans once recited prayers before kickoff to a Santeria church notorious for animal sacrifice, from a publicly funded Muslim school to a creationist museum. Wexler's no-holds-barred approach to investigating famous church/state brouhahas is as funny as it is informative.
Buy Holy Hullabaloos now at Beacon Press or IndieBound
"The sharpest, the most insightful, the most side-splittingly funny book on law since—Supreme Courtship!"
—Christopher Buckley, author of Supreme Courtship and Thank You For Smoking
“I've read a lot of entertaining travelogues and informative studies of Supreme Court cases, but never at the same time. Think Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation meets Peter Irons' The Courage of Their Convictions. Thank God for Holy Hullabaloos.”
—Pamela Karlan, founding director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford University
"Religion and politics are the two things we are not supposed to talk about. Jay Wexler does—with deadpan humor. We need to tone down the anger over these issues, and he shows the way."
—Alan Wolfe, author of Does American Democracy Still Work?
“Boston University law professor Wexler is also a published humorist. This felicitous combination of talents is put to good use as he visits the towns and cities where the always controversial cases concerning separation of church and state arise. Wexler’s lucid explications of difficult constitutional concepts and the vagaries of Supreme Court rulings are superb, providing readers a deeper understanding of the First Amendment and Supreme Court jurisprudence. But that’s only half the story. Wexler is laugh-out-loud funny as he narrates his odyssey through battleground sites from rural Wisconsin through Texas to the chambers of the U.S. Senate. Along the way he happily and with a usually generous spirit skewers Supreme Court justices, legislators, educators, law school professors and pretty much anyone else, including himself, who has ever taken a position on the enduring American controversies surrounding prayer in schools, religious displays on public property, or the teaching of evolution. This is a rare treat, a combination of thoughtful analysis and quirky humor that illuminates an issue that rarely elicits a laugh—and that is central to the American body politic.”
—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
“Jay Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, lectures on church-state issues of sufficient constitutional weight to reach the US Supreme Court. During a sabbatical, he sets out to parlay his lecture notes into a book that even people who would rather drink hemlock than read Supreme Court opinions might enjoy.
If the project sounds problematic, with great yawn-inducing potential, Wexler pulls it off stunningly in “Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars.’’ To augment his lecture notes, he embarks on a series of road trips to places “where landmark church/state cases had started.’’
He travels about the country, interviewing people who are linked to a dozen or so of the landmark cases. He calls on worshipers at the CloudWater Zendo Buddhist temple in Cleveland (the city instituted a school-voucher program that the Supreme Court upheld in 2002). He interviews the chaplain of the US Senate (the object of several futile court challenges to the prayer that opens its sessions). And so on.
The tour-guide device might have bombed in a lesser writer’s hands. It works for Wexler because of his gift for filtering arcane legal sludge into clear explanations, his keen eye for detail, and his self-mocking, zanily irreverent sensibility.”
—Boston Globe
Reading and book talk at Barnes & Noble at Boston University
My son, four years old at the time (now 22!), reads from Holy Hullabaloos
Not about HH, but here’s a video from a million years ago where we illustrate our family’s catch phrase
A comedy bit from a Holy Hullabaloos book event at the awesome Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina
Also not about HH but maybe the funniest thing I’ve ever made