Bio

James Serritella chairs the Religious Organizations Practice group at Burke, Warren, MacKay & Serritella. He focuses his practice on serving the legal needs of tax-exempt religious and not-for-profit organizations and managing overall client relationships. Jim represents parties in mediations and other alternative dispute resolution processes, which he helps design. He also functions as a mediator and a consultant to attorneys engaged in mediation or other alternative dispute resolution efforts. For the past two decades, he has advised clients regarding the management and resolution of individual claims and groups of complex interrelated claims. He advises on general corporate, constitutional, and regulatory matters as well as governance and sponsorship issues. He also represents clients in connection with crises having legal, ethical, public relations, and community relations dimensions. Jim has consulted internationally on constitutional and other legal issues relating to religious and not-for-profit organizations. Jim represents religious and other not-for-profit organizations in general corporate matters including governance and sponsorship issues as well as the creation of new entities, mergers, joint ventures, acquisitions, affiliations, and spin-offs. He has represented many kinds of entities including associations, churches, dioceses, synods, religious orders and congregations, hospitals and other health care entities, colleges, elementary and secondary schools, seminaries, social services agencies and institutions, and cemeteries. Many of these entities are affiliated with or sponsored by a religious organization, while others are secular in nature. The religious organizations come from a variety of traditions including Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Evangelical, and Protestant churches, as well as Jewish and Hindu faiths and other religious traditions. Jim has written and lectured extensively on religious freedom and on legal issues affecting exempt organizations. He is the editor-in-chief of Religious Organizations in the United States, A Study of Identity, Liberty, and the Law, an 834-page book published by Carolina Press. The book is a collection of essays designed to develop a new jurisprudence for organized religion. Jim is a founder of the DePaul University College of Law Center for Church/State Studies and served as chair of its advisory board. He was also a founder of the Center for Migration Studies in New York and an associate editor of the International Migration Digest (now called the International Migration Review). Jim received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1971. He earned an M.A. from the Committee for the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods at the University of Chicago. He has a B.A. from St. Charles Seminary College of Liberal Arts (State University of New York) and a second bachelor's degree from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He received mediation training from the National Health Lawyers Association; he also received advanced mediation training from the CPR International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard University, and the Center for Dispute Settlement.