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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Cross, Crucifix, Culture: An Approach To The Constitutional Meaning Of Confessional Symbols, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Pasquale Annicchino
Cross, Crucifix, Culture: An Approach To The Constitutional Meaning Of Confessional Symbols, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Pasquale Annicchino
Frederick Mark Gedicks
In the United States and Europe the constitutionality of government displays of confessional symbols depends on whether the symbols also have nonconfessional secular meaning (in the U.S.) or whether the confessional meaning is somehow absent (in Europe). Yet both the United States Supreme Court (USSCt) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) lack a workable approach to determining whether secular meaning is present or confessional meaning absent. The problem is that the government can nearly always articulate a possible secular meaning for the confessional symbols that it uses, or argue that the confessional meaning is passive and ineffective. What …
Overcoming Obstacles To Religious Exercise In K-12 Education, Lewis M. Wasserman
Overcoming Obstacles To Religious Exercise In K-12 Education, Lewis M. Wasserman
Lewis M. Wasserman
Overcoming Obstacles to Religious Exercise in K-12 Education Lewis M. Wasserman Abstract Judicial decisions rendered during the last half-century have overwhelmingly favored educational agencies over claims by parents for religious accommodations to public education requirements, no matter what constitutional or statutory rights were pressed at the tribunal, or when the conflict arose. These claim failures are especially striking in the wake of the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (“RFRAs”) passed by Congress in 1993 and, to date, by eighteen state legislatures thereafter, since the RFRAs were intended to (1) insulate religious adherents from injuries inflicted by the United States Supreme Court’s …
The Ministerial Exception And The Limits Of Religious Sovereignty, Ian C. Bartrum
The Ministerial Exception And The Limits Of Religious Sovereignty, Ian C. Bartrum
Ian C Bartrum
This paper explores the scope of independent religious sovereignty in the context of the ministerial exception.
The Constitutional Canon As Argumentative Metonymy, Ian C. Bartrum
The Constitutional Canon As Argumentative Metonymy, Ian C. Bartrum
Ian C Bartrum
This article builds on Philip Bobbitt's Wittgensteinian insights into constitutional argument and law. I examine the way that we interact with canonical texts as we construct arguments in the forms that Bobbitt has described. I contend that these texts serve as metonyms for larger sets of associated principles and values, and that their invocation usually is not meant to point to the literal meaning of the text itself. This conception helps explain how a canonical text's meaning in constitutional argument can evolve over time, and hopefully offers the creative practitioner some insight into the kinds of arguments that might accomplish …
The Status Of Classical Natural Law: Plato And The Parochialism Of Modern Theory, Eric Heinze
The Status Of Classical Natural Law: Plato And The Parochialism Of Modern Theory, Eric Heinze
Prof. Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University of London
The concept of modernity has long been central to legal theory. It is an intrinsically temporal concept, expressly or implicitly defined in contrast to pre-modernity.
Legal theorists sometimes draw comparisons between, on the one hand, various post-Renaissance positivist, liberal, realist or critical theories, and, on the other hand, the classical natural law or justice theories of antiquity or the middle ages, including such figures as Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine or Aquinas. Many theorists, however, while acknowledging superficial differences among the various classical theories, fail to appreciate the variety and complexity of pre-modern thought. Unduly simplifying pre-modern understandings of law, they end …
Epinomia: Plato And The First Legal Theory, Eric Heinze
Epinomia: Plato And The First Legal Theory, Eric Heinze
Prof. Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University of London
In comparison to Aristotle, Plato’s general understanding of law receives little attention in legal theory, due in part to ongoing perceptions of him as a mystic or a totalitarian. However, some of the critical or communitarian themes that have guided theorists since Aristotle already find strong expression in Plato’s work. More than any thinker until the 19th and 20th centuries, Plato rejects the rank individualism and self-interest which, in his view, emerge within democratic legal culture. He rejects schisms between legal norms and community values, institutional separation of law from morals, intricate regimes of legislation and adjudication, and a culture …