Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Law, Society, And Religion: Islam And The West, Paolo Davide Farah

Book Chapters

Law and religion are present in almost every society, where the predominance of one over the other can greatly vary, and, in some cases, they both contend for authority over the citizenry. From a historical standpoint, this resulted in a constant change in the relationship between law and religion. Globalization also had a role in this regard. In some instances, globalization exacerbates differences between religions instead of encouraging mediation; it seeks to fill the gap left by the diminishing role of religion in the West. Globalization also competes with religion; both are looking for ways to regulate conduct and push …

Individual Rights Vs. Collective Value In Paragraph 218: The Role Of Political Tradition In The Development Of German Abortion Policy, Annie Morgan

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

No abstract provided.

Collaborative Constructions: Designing High School History Curriculum With The Lost & Found Game Series, Owen Gottlieb, Shawn Clybor

Articles

This chapter addresses design research and iterative curriculum design for the Lost & Found games series. The Lost & Found card-to-mobile series is set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the twelfth century and focuses on religious laws of the period. The first two games focus on Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a key Jewish law code. A new expansion module which was in development at the time of the fieldwork described in this article that introduces Islamic laws of the period, and a mobile prototype of the initial strategy game has been developed with support National Endowment for the Humanities. The …

Fair Construction To Living Constitution: Analyzing Constitutional Interpretation Throughout United States History, Joshua Lloyd

Senior Honors Theses

The proper method of constitutional interpretation has been debated throughout the history of the Supreme Court. This debate has been defined by the tension between the originalist and living constitution jurisprudences. Each has been dominant at one point in United States history. A fair construction jurisprudence was almost universally utilized by the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution according to its original meaning until Plessy v. Ferguson. Then, due to an alliance between evangelicals and progressive scholars, a broader, more lenient living constitution jurisprudence developed which allowed justices to interpret the Constitution in light of changing social norms. Finally, …

Our Representative On This Island: Local Belonging And Transnational Citizenship Among Syrian And Lebanese Cubans, 1880-1980, John T. Ermer Jr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Émigrés from Ottoman Syria and Cuba who, beginning in the late-nineteenth century, traveled not unidirectionally, from one nation to another, but between and within multiethnic, polycentric empires. Tracing their history opens a route to better understanding global legal regimes of citizenship. Weaving government records from Cuba, France, and the United States with associational records and oral history interviews, this dissertation reveals how vernacular understandings of citizenship in Cuba and the Levant, based on locally derived conceptions of belonging, but over time contended with liberalizing legal reforms meant to redefine citizenship as a state-focused and legible status. As a mobile population …

Oral Interview: Contextualizing The Women's Rights Movement In Tunisia Through Family History, Walid Zarrad

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

In their path towards emancipation and equal rights, Tunisian women have gone through a number of phases that seem to be directly linked to legal changes and cultural factors. In fact, the Code of Personal Status (CPS) of 1956 seems to be a milestone in the women’s movement, and its following amendments continued on this path. However, it is a lot more complex than that. A piece of legislation officially passing is not a simple determinant of the state of Women’s Rights in a country.

Through Dorra Mahfoudh Draoui’s “Report on Gender and Marriage in Tunisian Society” and my interview …

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Racializing American ‘Egyptians’: Shifting Legal Discourse, 1690s–1860s, Ann Ostendorf

History Faculty Scholarship

This article situates the historical “Egyptian,” more commonly referred to as “Gypsy,” into the increasingly racist legal structures formed in the British North American colonies and the early United States, between the 1690s and 1860s. It simultaneously considers how those who considered themselves, or were considered by others, as “Egyptians” or “Gypsies” navigated life in the new realities created by such laws. Despite the limitations of state-produced sources from each era under study, inferences about these people’s experiences remain significant to building a more accurate and inclusive history of the United States. The following history narrates the lives of Joan …

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations And Multi-Game Approaches, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

This chapter explores what the authors discovered about analog games and game design during the many iterative processes that have led to the Lost & Found series, and how they found certain constraints and affordances (that which an artifact assists, promotes or allows) provided by the boardgame genre. Some findings were counter-intuitive. What choices would allow for the modeling of complex systems, such as legal and economic systems? What choices would allow for gameplay within the time of a class-period? What mechanics could promote discussions of tradeoff decisions? If players are expending too much cognition on arithmetic strategizing, could that …

"She Was Surprised And Furious": Expatriation, Suffrage, Immigration, And The Fragility Of Women's Citizenship, 1907-1940, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

This article stands at the intersection of women’s history and the history of citizenship, immigration, and naturalization laws. The first part of this article proceeds by examining the general legal status of women under the laws of coverture, in which married women’s legal existence was “covered” by that of their husbands. It then discusses the 1907 Expatriation Act, which resulted in women who were U.S. citizens married to non-U.S. citizens losing their citizenship. The following sections discuss how suffragists challenged the 1907 law in the courts and how passage of the Nineteenth Amendment—and with it a new concept of women’s …

Reviewed Work(S): Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, And The Weird In Flyover Country By Hollars, Susan Neville

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Lost & Found: New Harvest, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

Set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the 12th century, a great crossroads of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens …

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

The forty-fifth presidency of the United States has sent lawyers reaching once more for the Founders’ dictionaries and legal treatises. In courtrooms, law schools, and media outlets across the country, the original meanings of the words etched into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 have become the staging ground for debates ranging from the power of a president to trademark his name in China to the rights of a legal permanent resident facing deportation. And yet, in this age when big data promises to solve potential challenges of interpretation and judges have for the most part agreed that original meaning should …

One Rule Of Law Project In Post-Soviet Russia, Albert E. Scherr

Law Faculty Scholarship

"One Rule of Law Project in Post-Soviet Russia" is published as Chapter 9 of the book At Home Abroad: Friendship First - A Look at Rule of Law Projects and Other International Insights, (ed. Joseph Nadeau, New York: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC, 2019). This book provides personal insights into an international cooperative effort to promote the rule of law in emerging democracies around the world. Professor Scherr's chapter examines the cultural context within a study of the rule-of-law project that was conducted between 1999 and 2004 in Vologda, Russia.

Male Same-Sex Relations In Socialist China, Wenqing Kang

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Building A Regime Of Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1840-1945, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

H-Pad is happy to announce the release of its sixth broadside. In “Building a Regime of Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1840-1945,” Felice Batlan traces a century of U.S. government laws, policies, and attitudes regarding immigration. The broadside explores how ideas about race, class, religion, and the Other repeatedly led to laws restricting the immigration of those who members of Congress, the President, and the U.S. public considered inferior and/or a threat.

Salafism, Wahhabism, And The Definition Of Sunni Islam, Rob J. Williams

Honors Program: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

My capstone deals with the historical definition of Sunni Islam, and how it has changed in approximately the past 200 years. Around 1800, Sunni Islam was pretty clearly defined by an adherence to one of four maddhabs, or schools of law: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali schools and are all based in nearly a millennium of legal scholarship. Since 1800, however, numerous reform movements have sprung up which disavow previous scholarship and interpret Islamic law their own way. However, certain reformist groups, such as Traditionalist Salafis and Wahhabis, claim that their version of Islam is the only “pure” …

'Civil Wars: A History In Ideas' By David Armitage (Review), Zachary C. Shirkey

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Land And Law In The Age Of Enterprise: A Legal History Of Railroad Land Grants In The Pacific Northwest, 1864-1916, Sean M. Kammer

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Federal land subsidies to railroad corporations comprised an important part of the federal government’s policies towards its western land domain in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In all, Congress granted over a hundred million acres to railroad corporations to subsidize construction of a transcontinental railway network. Long after the last such grant in 1871, these land grants continued to incite political contests in Congress and state legislatures and legal disputes in communities across the West. By the end of the century, railroad corporations had become manifestations not just of the threatening growth of corporate power in the United …

Shelby County V. Holder - Brief Contextualized, Mark W. Wolfe

Student Publications

This paper begins with three major factors that set the stage for Shelby: first, a history of the VRA; second, an overview of Northwest Austin with a focus on how it led directly to Shelby; and finally, Shelby County’s motivations for bringing the suit. An examination of racial demographics compared to statistics on voter registration and minority officeholders in Alabama and Louisiana—two states originally subject to preclearance—follows in light of the Court’s claims on the matter. A conclusion will take a brief look at laws passed since Shelby with an eye towards a future critique. [excerpt]

Indigenous Women, Mother Tongues, And Nation Building In New England: A Tribal Policy Leadership Series, Amy Den Ouden, Chris Bobel

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

In collaboration with the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP), Indigenous women educators and leaders, the Dept. of Women’s and Gender Studies is redesigning WOST/WGS 270, Native American Women in North America, to incorporate a lecture series on nation building and a semester-long community engagement project fostering student leadership in a research and policy formation project focused on legislating and funding a Native American language education law in Massachusetts.

'Dred Scott V. Sandford' Analysis, Sarah E. Roessler

Student Publications

The Scott v. Sandford decision will forever be known as a dark moment in America's history. The Supreme Court chose to rule on a controversial issue, and they made the wrong decision. Scott v. Sandford is an example of what can happen when the Court chooses to side with personal opinion instead of what is right.

''Get Your Asphalt Off My Ancestors!'': Reclaiming Richmond's African Burial Ground, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

By treating spatial conflict as one way communities wrestle with the memory and legacy of slavery, this article unites critical landscape analysis, a tool of legal geography, with legal and cultural analysis and recent scholarship on African American reparations. A slave cemetery lay beneath a parking lot in Shockoe Bottom, a neighborhood of downtown Richmond that was once a major slave-trading hub. In recent years, controversy arose over the site’s use, generating racially charged local debate and two failed lawsuits seeking to preserve the site. This article examines the significance of the African Burial Ground controversy by analyzing its symbolic, …

Pirates, Exiles, And Empire: English Seamen, Atlantic Expansion, And Jamaican Settlement, 1558-1658, Amanda J. Snyder

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A life of piracy offered marginal men a profession with a degree of autonomy, despite the brand of “outlaw” and the fear of prosecution. At various times throughout history, governments and crowned heads suspended much of their piracy prosecution, licensing men to work as “privateers” for the state, supplementing naval forces. This practice has a long history, but in sixteenth-century England, Elizabeth I (1558-1603) significantly altered this tradition. Recognizing her own weakness in effectively prosecuting these men and the profit they could contribute to the government, Elizabeth began incorporating pirates into the English naval corps in peacetime—not just in war. …

Underwood, Warner Lewis, 1808-1872 (Sc 2678), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2678. Letters of Warner Lewis Underwood of Bowling Green, Kentucky, written to his family from Texas, Washington, D. C., Scotland, and Frankfort, Kentucky. He writes to his wife of business and household matters,and of political affairs during his service in the Kentucky Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. A letter to his son-in-law from Scotland, where Underwood was serving as consul, praises his Civil War service. Correspondence with his son discusses the younger Underwood’s law studies in Albany, New York.

The Political And Legal Uses Of Scripture, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

States' Rights Apogee, 1760-1840, Ryan Setliff

Masters Theses

America's states' rights tradition has held much influence since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. In late 1798, in response to the Federalist administration's adoption of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were formally adopted by the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky respectively. These resolutions set a lasting precedent for state interposition and nullification. As well concurrence with these doctrines can be found in the Virginia Resolves of 1790, the constitutional debates of 1787-1790, and all throughout the colonial-revolutionary period of the 1760s to 1780s. In time, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions would gain …

A Plea For Freedom: Enslaved Independence Through Petitions For Freedom In Washington D.C. Between 1810 And 1830, Trevor J. Shalon

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Between 1810 and 1830, over 190 petitions for freedom by African Americans went through the District Court of Washington D.C. The free African American community which had emerged following the American Revolution had been restricted in the beginning of the nineteenth century and the rights granted to free and enslaved African Americans were retracted. The methods by which enslaved African Americans had used to obtain their freedom were eliminated and more innovative methods would needed in order to continue the expansion of the free community.

As the nineteenth century progressed, as other methods were eliminated, the number of petitions issued …

Constitution Day 2012: The American Judiciary, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

Robert Berry, research librarian for the social sciences at the Sacred Heart University Library, has written an essay about the role of the American Judiciary in interpreting laws of the United States government. The essay was written for the occasion of Constitution Day 2012 at Sacred Heart University.

Colonial And Post-Colonial Human Rights Violations In Nigeria, Alka Jauhari

Political Science & Global Affairs Faculty Publications

Nigeria has a long history of violation of human rights. It is commonly believed that human rights violations in Nigeria have colonial roots. In an effort to consolidate and expand their power, the British colonial masters grossly violated the rights of the people in Nigeria. But even 50 years after independence, the Nigerian citizens continue to face constant violations of their basic rights. After independence, Nigeria has experienced a mix of periods of military and civilian rule. The military rule in Nigeria became a symbol of complete authoritarianism. After every military coup, the government suspended the constitution and, thus, absolved …