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Religious Difference In A Secular Age: The Minority Report By Saba Mahmoud (2016) Book Review, Lama Abu-Odeh
Religious Difference In A Secular Age: The Minority Report By Saba Mahmoud (2016) Book Review, Lama Abu-Odeh
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The Minority Report is a text that tries to respond to the problem of essentializing Islam (the culturalism problem) by performing a flip so that all the bad attributes typically associated with “Islam” are now attributed to secularism instead. It is secularism that discriminates, that is sectarian, that encourages violence, that is repressive, sexist, etc. This Mahmood does by on the one hand hyper-politicizing secularism (depleting it of its universalist drive), and on the other under-politicizing it by ignoring its internal indeterminacy, complexity, open structure and varied distributive effects. The result is an account that moves between crude historicism-secularism is …
The Siren Song Of History: Originalism And The Religion Clauses, Jeffrey Shulman
The Siren Song Of History: Originalism And The Religion Clauses, Jeffrey Shulman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
It is hard to foresee much happiness in the lot of those seeking the original meaning of the Religion Clauses. We may acknowledge the opacity of the historical record, the variety of viewpoints held by founders forgotten and non-forgotten, the humanness of the founders who did not always practice what they preached, even the basic indeterminancy of language; still, we are seduced by the siren song of interpretive certainty. But the search for greater clarity is not without its payoff. As the three books under review here illustrate, the more we look for answers in the historical record, the more …
Pluralism And Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum
Pluralism And Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
What role does and should religion play in the legal sphere of a modern liberal democracy? Does religion threaten to create divisions that would undermine the stability of the constitutional order? Or is religious disagreement itself a force that works to create consensus on some of the core commitments of constitutionalism--liberty of conscience, toleration, limited government, and the rule of law? This essay explores these questions from the perspectives of contemporary political philosophy and constitutional theory. The thesis of the essay is that pluralism--the diversity of religious and secular conceptions of the good--can and should work as a force for …
The Word On Trial, Robin West
The Word On Trial, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Milner Ball's extraordinary book, The Word and the Law, begins with a narrative account of "seven practices in law." The seven practitioners Ball brings to life for the reader share two powerful traits: they all, in quite different ways, use law to lessen the multiple sufferings of various communities of poor people, and they all, by doing so, strengthen the communities within which and for which they labor. The reader gains from these accounts not only a sympathetic understanding of the lives of seven lawyers, but a renewed sense of the possibilities their practices present. This can be put any …