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Religion Law

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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Natural Law And The Rhetoric Of Empire: Reynolds V. United States, Polygamy, And Imperialism, Nathan B. Oman Sep 2019

Natural Law And The Rhetoric Of Empire: Reynolds V. United States, Polygamy, And Imperialism, Nathan B. Oman

Nathan B. Oman

In 1879, the U.S. Supreme Court construed the Free Exercise Clause for the first time, holding in Reynolds v. United States that Congress could punish Mormon polygamy. Historians have interpreted Reynolds, and the anti-polygamy legislation and litigation that it midwifed, as an extension of Reconstruction into the American West. This Article offers a new historical interpretation, one that places the birth of Free Exercise jurisprudence in Reynolds within an international context of Great Power imperialism and American international expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. It does this by recovering the lost theory of religious freedom that the Mormons …


Crime And Sacred Spaces In Early Modern Poland, Magda Teter Jul 2010

Crime And Sacred Spaces In Early Modern Poland, Magda Teter

Magda Teter

This principle of intersection between action and sacredness was shared by both Jews and Christians. Both Christian and Jewish religious elites highlighted differences between sacred. In Catholicism, validation of space required a consecration by a bishop in preparation for the ritual of the Eucharist. Church vessels were viewed as sacred in relation to the Eucharist. The Eucharist defined levels of sacredness. The controversy over the nature of the Eucharist during the Reformation, challenged the notion of Christian sacred place. After the Reformation, in the minds of the church, and in Poland increasingly also in the minds of the secular courts, …