Religion Law Commons^™

A More Capacious Concept Of Church, Philip Hackney, Samuel D. Brunson

Articles

United States tax law provides churches with extra benefits and robust protection from IRS enforcement actions. Churches and religious organizations are automatically exempt from the income tax without needing to apply to be so recognized and without needing to file a tax return. Beyond that, churches are protected from audit by stringent procedures. There are good reasons to consider providing a distance between church and state, including the state tax authority. In many instances, Congress granted churches preferential tax treatment to try to avoid excess entanglement between church and state, though that preferential treatment often just shifts the locus of …

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 …

Majestic Law And The Subjective Stop, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

Justice John Paul Stevens subscribed to "a majestic conception" of the Constitution. This Article articulates and defends that vision. Majestic law and legal reasoning characteristically involve frank moral reasoning, such as one finds in the Eighth Amendment's "evolving standards of decency" test for proportionate punishment, or in Due Process formulations such as an appeal to "immutable principles of justice, which inhere in the very idea of free government." Majestic law employs moral values, norms, and judgments in legal reasoning, taking them on their own terms. Majestic legal reasoning does not weigh revealed preferences for decency, for example. It asks whether …

An Economic Approach To Religious Exemptions, Stephanie H. Barclay

Journal Articles

Externalities caused by religious exemptions have been getting the spotlight again in light a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this term: Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. Some argue that religious individuals should be required to internalize the costs they impose on third parties and thus should be denied the right to practice that harmful behavior. These new progressive theories about harm trade on rhetoric and normative intuitions regarding externalities and costs. But curiously, these theories also largely ignore an influential theoretical movement that has studied externalities and costs for the last fifty years: law and economics.

This Article …

Commerce, Religion, And The Rule Of Law, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

The rule of law and religion can act as commercial substitutes. Both can create the trust required for material prosperity. The rule of law simplifies social interactions, turning people into formal legal agents and generating a map of society that the state can observe and control, thus credibly committing to the enforcement of the legal rights demanded by impersonal markets. Religion, in contrast, embraces complex social identities. Within these communities, economic actors can monitor and sanction misbehavior. Both approaches have benefits and problems. The rule of law allows for trade among strangers, fostering peaceful pluralism. However, law breeds what Montesquieu …

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

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.

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 in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

The Possible Advantages Of Islamic Financial Jurisprudence: An Empirical Study Of The Dow Jones Islamic Market Index, Russell Powell, Arthur Delong

Faculty Articles

The Islamic financial system experienced a disproportionately smaller economic hardship in 2008 and 2009 because adherence to Shariʿa tends to encourage conservative investment approaches. Islamic mutual funds were prohibited from investing in the non-Islamic financial sector, highly leveraged companies, and various derivative instruments. Ultimately, this conservative investment approach may have been an effective strategy for mitigating downside risk. The article analyzes the fundamental classical legal requirements that pertain to modern Islamic finance, compares the modern view of Islamic equity investing and its secular capitalist counterpart, explores whether adherence to Shariʿa principles, as defined by the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index, …

Church And State: An Economic Analysis, Keith N. Hylton, Yulia Rodionova, Fei Deng

Faculty Scholarship

What purpose is served by a government's protection of religious liberty? Many have been suggested, the most prominent of which center on the protection of freedom of belief and expression. However, since every regulation potentially interferes with religious freedom, it is useful to consider more concrete purposes that could suggest limits on the degree to which religious liberty should be protected. This paper focuses on the concrete economic consequences of state regulation of religion. We examine the effects of state regulation on corruption, economic growth, and inequality. The results suggest that laws and practices burdening religion enhance corruption. Laws burdening …

Making Sense Of The New Financial Deal, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I assess the enactment and implications of the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. To set the stage, I begin by very briefly reviewing the causes of the crisis. I then argue that the legislation has two very clear objectives. The first is to limit the risk of the shadow banking system by more carefully regulating the key instruments and institutions of contemporary finance. The second objective is to limit the damage in the event one of these giant institutions fails. While the new regulation of the instruments of contemporary finance—including clearing and exchange …

Modified Plans Of Reorganization And The Basic Chapter 13 Bargain, David G. Carlson

Articles

A very large number of chapter 13 plans are confirmed each year. Unlike chapter 11 plans (for non-individuals), these plans may be revised after confirmation. The modification provisions of the Bankruptcy Code, however, give very little guidance as to what constitutes a permissible modification. In contrast, confirmation of the original plan is very carefully governed. This article theorizes that modification must honor the basic chapter 13 bargain. According to this bargain, the debtor is entitled to the bankruptcy estate and the creditors are entitled to net surplus income. The article assesses whether the diffuse and disorganized caselaw of modification adheres …

Baghdad Booksellers, Basra Carpet Merchants, And The Law Of God And Man: Legal Pluralism And The Contemporary Muslim Experience, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

There is a crisis in our law schools in the study of Islamic law and the law of the Muslim polities. The current approaches either focus exclusively on national codes to the derogation of other vitally important influences on the legal order, most importantly the body of norms and rules derived from Islamic foundational texts known as the shari'a, or they regard as secondary, and at times irrelevant, the actual legal order of the societies in favor of an academic construction of the theories of medieval Muslim jurists. Neither of these approaches reflects with a necessary degree of accuracy the …

"Free" Religion And "Captive" Schools: Protestants, Catholics, And Education, 1945-1965, Sarah Barringer Gordon

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pilgrim Law: Overcoming False Consciousness Through The Witness Of London's Economic Migrants, Vincent D. Rougeau

Journal Articles

The article discusses the author's view on the works and beliefs of Robert E. Rodes Jr. He considered faith and professional life as the powerful link on Rodes works and cited three points of reflection on the matter which includes on Rodes' concept of "Pilgrim Law" that has been influential on the author's works, thinking about the relationship between the professional roles of a lawyer and a call to a lived Christian faith. He believed that the Rodes' book "Pilgrim Law" took a formidable task on extending the principles of the theology of liberation to American jurisprudence and became an …

Revaluing Restitution: From The Talmud To Postsocialism, Michael A. Heller, Christopher Serkin

Faculty Scholarship

Whatever happened to the study of restitution? Once a core private law subject along with property, torts, and contracts, restitution has receded from American legal scholarship. Few law professors teach the material, fewer still write in the area, and no one even agrees what the field comprises anymore. Hanoch threatens to reverse the tide and make restitution interesting again. The book takes commonplace words such as "value" and "gain" and shows how they embody a society's underlying normative principles. Variations across cultures in the law of unjust enrichment reflect differences in national understandings of sharing, property, and even personhood. As …