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Introduction, Joseph L. Sax
Introduction, Joseph L. Sax
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Reading through the articles in this Symposium is like walking deep into a dense forest. The experience is exhilarating but edged by a concern that the farther you go, the less sure you are of where you are. The articles here reveal the problem of cultural preservation in all its complexity and many-sidedness. This is not one of those symposia where the authors seek to outdo each other in self-condemnation for the wrongs perpetrated by colonial invaders on hapless indigenous people. Neither is it a lament for the assault on science by advocates of modish multiculturalism. The essays here are …
Courts And Cultural Distinctiveness, Marie R. Deveney
Courts And Cultural Distinctiveness, Marie R. Deveney
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The claim that minority ethnic and religious groups are culturally distinct from the dominant society is often, either implicitly or explicitly, a key element of demands these groups make to courts and legislatures for accommodation of their needs. In such cases, the decision maker's understanding of what constitutes "cultural distinctiveness" is crucial, for it can strongly influence the outcome of the accommodation question. In this brief Essay related to Peter Welsh's and Joseph Carens's papers and Dean Suagee's remarks delivered at the Preservation of Minority Cultures Symposium, I contrast these panelists' subtle and sophisticated understandings of cultural distinctiveness with the …
Minority Cultures And The Cosmopolitan Alternative, Jeremy Waldron
Minority Cultures And The Cosmopolitan Alternative, Jeremy Waldron
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
I have chosen not to talk in this Article about the warning that Rushdie is sounding in his essay In Good Faith, but to discuss more affirmatively the image of the modern self that he conveys. Still, I hope that we do not lose sight of the warning. The communitarianism that can sound cozy and attractive in a book by Robert Bellah or Michael Sandel can be blinding, dangerous, and disruptive in the real world, where communities do not come ready-packaged and where communal allegiances are as much ancient hatreds of one's neighbors as immemorial traditions of culture.