Prior to returning to academia this year, Ashby Boyle was an entrepreneur and attorney, beginning his career at the Washington, D.C. office of Sullivan & Cromwell. He is currently a research fellow at Yale, at work on two books. One is on the theological foundations of The Book of Mormon and the other is an update of his Yale dissertation on the religious jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court. Ashby received an AB Degree with Honors in 1980 from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, from which he took a two-year leave of absence during 1976-78 to serve a mission for the LDS Church in Madrid, Spain. Returning to Princeton, he was awarded the Aaron Austin Godfrey memorial prize given annually at Princeton University to an undergraduate of “exceptional potential” to fund research in Spain on that country’s transformation from a fascist dictatorship to a constitutional form of government. Additionally, he received an MA and JD degree from Columbia, and an MPhil (Criminology) from the University of Cambridge in England (Emmanuel College). While at Columbia Law School, he was a Charles Evans Hughes Fellow, Teaching Fellow in Property Law and member of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Upon graduation, he was selected as a law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. He served as an aide to U.S. Senator Orrin G. Hatch in addition to service at the White House for President Gerald R. Ford (after the fall of Saigon in Vietnam) as a Presidential Appointee to The President’s Advisory Committee on Refugees. He studied religious ethics at Yale within the years 1981 to 1990, receiving MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from Yale University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He also taught at Yale. His teaching experience there included courses in religious ethics in Yale College, as well as social ethics and liberation theology at the Yale Divinity School. In 2004 he was recognized by the New York City Bar Association for his pro bono work. He successfully represented the National Council of the ACLU pro bono on behalf of a seniors’ group in Maryland in a First Amendment case decided under the Maryland State Constitution. He has also served as the National Chairman of the March of Dimes Youth Program. He currently serves as CEO of the American Religious Liberties Union and is a member of the Alumni Schools Committee of Yale University for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.
