Un Stoppable

From the expansive windows of her waterfront condominium, Marci Hamilton regards the Delaware River, steely under a winter sky but breaking white where rocks and other obstacles rise from the riverbed. “It reminds me so much of Wyoming,” she says, the state in which her mother was born and where her grandfather, William J. Wehrli, worked as a lawyer, once arguing a case before the United State Supreme Court. She shares her home with her husband, Peter Kuzma, a chemist, a corgi named Jane Eyre, and a newly acquired Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Eva. Her two children, Will and Alexandra Kuzma—a lawyer and doctor, respectively—visit often. As much as Hamilton loves Wyoming, the year-round beauty of the River Towns (and her Philly-born husband’s need to stick close to the city of his birth) keep her firmly planted on the banks of the Delaware. They’ve lived in Bucks County ever since getting married forty-two years ago.

 

Like her grandfather, Hamilton is an attorney. But she is better known as a law professor, an eminent legal scholar in the realm of religious liberty, a think tank founder, and an unyielding advocate for victims of child sexual abuse. Her grasp of some of today’s most compelling constitutional arguments has led to her work on cases related to her scholarship. She has argued cases across the country, many of them landmarks, before supreme courts both state and federal. The think tank she founded in 2016, CHILD USA, has led an unrelenting mission to reform statute-of-limitations laws that impede the ability of survivors of child sexual abuse to achieve legal justice. Hamilton left the nonprofit in February with plans to write a book about her work in religious liberty law and create a new organization devoted strictly to preventing child sexual abuse.

 

Hamilton grew up in Dallas, Texas, and Wheaton, Illinois—“the buckle of the Bible Belt,” she calls it—and early on she developed a fascination with the intersection of philosophy and theology. Her passion was spurred in large part by the minister of her Presbyterian church, Cecil Lower, a PhD who was prone to delivering highly intellectual sermons. She also loved to write, and at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, her undergraduate alma mater, she pursued a double major in English and philosophy.

 

Later, she enrolled in a post-graduate program at Penn State, emerging with dual master’s degrees in philosophy and creative writing. But as much as writing was (and continues to be) her “happy time,” she couldn’t see herself sitting in a room all day with her thoughts and a typewriter. Intrigued by the potential intellectual challenges posed by a legal career (and inspired by her grandfather’s example), she applied to the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, Penn Carey Law. Her husband, she notes, has compared her to a salmon, “swimming upstream every year from school to school.”

 

She proved a stellar student. Not only was she elected editor of the law review, but she also clerked for two judicial eminences, Edward R. Becker, a chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, and Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court. The latter experience was particularly formative. “I came to call her my law mom,” Hamilton says.

 

Of all the lessons she learned from O’Connor, the most important, she notes, was “professionalism, to the highest degree.” She remembers acutely the teachable moment: Angered by what she viewed as a personal attack on O’Connor in an opinion written by fellow Justice Antonin Scalia, Hamilton struck back at Scalia in a draft opinion she prepared for O’Connor, whose reaction was swift. “She told me, ‘We don’t talk like that. We stay professional.’ And that was one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned,” she says. “And so I’ve never, ever been rude to someone. It’s always professional, no matter how high the temperatures get.”

 

It was her clerkship with O’Connor that garnered Hamilton her first legal case. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), restricting the ability of any public agency, department, or official from substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion. Hamilton’s immediate reaction to the law was that it was unconstitutional. “None of the powers of Congress justify it,” she says. “In essence, it’s an attempt to amend the First Amendment without going through Article V”—which lays out the procedure for altering the Constitution. Then a law professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, in New York City, Hamilton subsequently wrote about the law in a scholarly article for the Cardozo Law Review.

 

Before the article was published, Hamilton got a call from an attorney in Texas who was representing the city of Boerne (pronounced “Bernie”) against the archbishop of San Antonio, P. F. Flores, whose request to expand a church in the city was denied by the local zoning authorities. Flores and his lawyers challenged the denial, citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and on the day of the judge’s impending ruling, the city’s attorney, who’d just learned of Hamilton’s upcoming article, asked her if she could get a draft to him, posthaste. She did, and the judge ruled in favor of Boerne, citing the article. Later, a court of appeals overturned the ruling, and when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, the mayor of Boerne, knowing that Hamilton had clerked at the Court, asked her to represent the city. “So the first case I ever had,” she says, “was at the Court.”

 

Meanwhile, her counterpart, Douglas Laycock, was an experienced litigator and law professor and a leading scholar on laws pertaining to religious liberty. “But the truth was,” Hamilton says, “because I had clerked at the Court and Laycock had not, I fundamentally understood what was going to persuade them, and I won.” In its ruling in City of Boerne v. Flores, delivered on June 25, 1997, the Supreme Court declared the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to be unconstitutional as it applied to the states because it exceeded the authority of Congress under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

 

Hamilton suddenly found herself in demand. State attorneys general, child protection advocates, and the National Association of Regulatory Agencies reached out with stories of people, many of them children, who’d been harmed by religion: “I learned that children were dying in Oregon from faith healing,” Hamilton says. “I learned about the Amish not educating their children and the harm it does. I was educated about religious summer camps where children were being tied to trees.”

 

She became a vocal advocate against extreme religious liberty, a phrase meant to describe the largely unfettered right of individuals or groups to act on their religious beliefs, even if those beliefs substantially harm or infringe on the rights of others. Among law professors, such advocacy put Hamilton in a narrow minority. “I was essentially the only law professor in the country,” she says, “who was very publicly saying that extreme religious liberty was wrong.”

 

Leslie Griffin, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who worked with Hamilton at CHILD USA, notes that “she’s been for everybody’s rights and not for rights that protect some and not others.” A Presbyterian married to a “cradle-to-grave Catholic” (her words), Hamilton is no anti-religion zealot. She is, however, a fervent supporter of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, the First Amendment guarantee of the separation of church and state. “Tragically,” she says, “the Supreme Court has abandoned the Establishment Clause.”

 

Hamilton points to “a series of cases” in which the court has eased longstanding restrictions on religious schools receiving direct government funding, allowed prayer in public spaces, and permitted government-supported religious expression. She cites in particular Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a 2022 case in which the court permitted a high school football coach to lead a prayer with his players on the field after each game— “which was unconstitutional for decades,” Hamilton says.

 

The late 1990s was not a fortuitous time for lawyers concerned with the rights of people who’d been harmed by religion.Then, in early 2002, the Boston Globe published the first article in its investigation into allegations of the sexual abuse of children by priests in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boston. The series, “Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church,” brought national attention to a scourge that had been exacerbated by the church’s deliberate coverups of abuse accusations.

 

Suddenly, attorneys representing child sex abuse victims were approaching Hamilton to work with them. One of them was Lynne Abraham, then the district attorney of Philadelphia, who brought Hamilton in as a consultant in an investigation into efforts by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to cover up allegations of sexual abuse by dozens of clergy in the diocese. “She was so brilliant,” Abraham says of Hamilton, “it was like watching a supernova explode in front of my face.” Abraham calls Hamilton “a tireless advocate for victims of clergy sex abuse.”

 

Meanwhile, Hamilton was collaborating with litigators working against the church’s lawyers, who argued that the First Amendment protected the church from being sued for clergy sex abuse. “We won a lot of those cases,” she says, “and in the end there are only three states left”—Missouri, Utah, and Washington—“where you can’t sue based on religion.”

 

But the mere ability to sue wasn’t sufficient to allow redress for victims. “As a law professor,” Hamilton says, “I was seeing pretty quickly that the biggest barrier for child abuse victims was the statute of limitations, that you could have all the facts, all the evidence, but you couldn’t go to court because of this silly deadline.” Statutes of limitations, or SOLs, limit the amount of time in which victims can take legal action after an alleged crime is committed. Before 2002, victims in some states had to report their abuse within two years from the date it occurred in order to go to court. Many other state statutes allowed victims only until their mid-20s. Because of the nature of child sexual abuse and the sense of shame it frequently carries, victims are often reluctant to come forward until well into adulthood. And given that such trauma typically delays one’s understanding of what took place, it takes some victims years to understand the reality that they were, indeed, abused. According to a report from CHILD USA, only fifteen percent of victims report their abuse to authorities. Among those who do, more than seven in ten don’t disclose their abuse within five years of its occurrence. Analyzing the cases of children who were abused as Boy Scouts, the report found that half of those who reported abuse were 50 years old or older.

 

Overturning statutes of limitations for child sexual abuse became Hamilton’s mission, whether that meant submitting expert testimony, advising state legislators, or filing (pro bono) the legal documents known as amicus briefs, which offer the courts advice or information from those not directly involved in litigating a specific case. In 2007–2008, on sabbatical as a visiting scholar at Princeton, Hamilton wrote Justice Denied: What America Must Do To Protect Its Children (Cambridge University Press), a book that argued persuasively for the abolition of statutes of limitations for victims of child sex abuse. “It didn’t occur to me,” she says, “that anyone would think that this was a controversial idea.” After the book was published, an article that appeared in the conservative religious journal First Things disabused Hamilton of that notion.

 

The article was written by L. Martin Nussbaum, the legal counsel for the Colorado Catholic Conference, and his wife, Melissa Musick Nussbaum. Titled “MarciWorld,” it led with a sneer: “Welcome to MarciWorld,” it read, “where legislation can stop the sexual abuse of children.” The authors then proceeded to dismiss Justice Denied as “a sloppy piece of work, poorly researched and poorly written.” As soon as she read the article, Hamilton says, “I knew I’d hit a nerve, and then I dug in.” In 2004, she founded a website, sol-reform.com, that tracked all state-level statutes of limitations, a time-consuming endeavor requiring the assistance of a half-dozen law school students who helped with research.

 

When the University of Pennsylvania offered her a job as a professor of practice—a position that doesn’t entail the administrative work required of most professors but also doesn’t afford tenure—she was intrigued but let her prospective employer know that she was at the point where she needed either to start a nonprofit or stop working on statute-of-limitation cases.

Penn agreed she could start the nonprofit. Hamilton founded CHILD USA, based in Philadelphia, ten years ago as an interdisciplinary think tank focused on justice for child sex abuse victims. The organization is unusual, Hamilton says, in that it draws on both legal and social science, the latter of which is key to changing laws. “What I found in the early stages of working on statutes of limitations is that you can go in with many survivor stories and you can move people,” she says, “but you cannot change the law unless you give them statistics and baselines.”

 

Over the past eight years, she and a team of social scientists at CHILD USA developed an app called the Gold Standard Prevention Program, which contains a questionnaire designed to help organizations that serve young people assess their sexual abuse prevention policies. Scouting America was the app’s first adopter. “Often,” Leslie Griffin says, “children come last.” At Child USA, she says, Hamilton’s work was focused “on showing people that children have rights.”

 

Hamilton says she left CHILD USA to focus her work on child sexual abuse prevention while the organization continues its work on reforming statute-of-limitations laws. “I’m just not done with the prevention side of it,” she says, “and so I feel like it’s an unfinished project that I need to work on.”

 

CHILD USA continues to track the country’s statutes of limitations, updating them every Thursday. Through the nonprofit, and on her own before its founding, Hamilton was instrumental in getting more than 300 statutes of limitations for child sexual abuse either lengthened or abolished altogether.

 

In 2022 the think tank advocated for the passage of the New York Adult Survivors Act. The law offered a one-year “lookback window,” starting from November 24, 2022, in which sexual abuse victims for whom the statute of limitations had elapsed could sue their alleged abusers. (A similar New York Law, the Child Victims Act, allowing survivors of child sexual abuse to file criminal charges until age 28 and civil lawsuits until age 55, took effect in 2019.) “And so we were instrumental in E. Jean Carroll being able to sue Donald Trump,” Hamilton says. “She had no legal leg to stand on—the SOL was blocking her—but once she could get into court, she could win.”

 

In November, Trump asked the Supreme Court to review the civil judgment in favor of Carroll. As of this writing, the Court hasn’t yet issued a decision to review or not. Hamilton says other statue-of-limitation changes that CHILD USA advocated for helped victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein get their day in court.

 

Like the river outside her window, Hamilton has encountered her share of obstacles. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as noted, is still being utilized to allow religious entities to escape accountability for the harm that occurred within their organizations. “The current Republican Party,” Hamilton notes, “is being controlled by the religious right, and they love RFRA.”

 

She’s certainly made enemies. “You cannot change the culture without making enemies,” she says, “and the bishops have not been thrilled with my truth-talking.” In December 2023, L. Martin Nussbaum published another article in First Things, attacking Hamilton both directly and obliquely, asserting, for instance, that “for tens of thousands, the ability to report [child sexual abuse] has less to do with the gestation of the memory or the alignment of the mental-health stars than with publicity related to particular institutions or perpetrators, attorney advertising, and opportunities for compensation.” In other words, lawyers like Hamilton are searching for victims in order to turn a profit.

 

It’s hard to see Hamilton as an ambulance chaser, especially given her ample pro bono work. And while she still dreams of chucking it all to “write novels on the beach,” it’s also hard to see her giving up her work on behalf of children, whose collective fate continues to distress her. Asked about the greatest threats to children in 2026, she cites “the concept that we can go back to the 1950s,” when a husband’s rights superseded those of women and children. She also worries that the parents’ rights movement—“the idea that the family is holy and that you can always trust parents”—will lead to a climate in which child abuse can more easily remain hidden.

 

Speaking of the groups and individuals that have set these forces in motion, she says, “These people are not being held responsible now.” She stops for a beat, suspended perhaps between despair and righteous indignation. “But they will be,” she says. Surely, when that moment of accountability comes to pass, Hamilton will have played a hand in its arrival.

 

Leslie Garisto Pfaff is a regular contributor to River Towns. She wrote about Lambertville’s Oaxacan community in the Winter issue.