Religion Law Commons^™

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 …

Law Library Blog (September 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Is This A Christian Nation?: Virtual Symposium September 25, 2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Is The Establishment Clause Asymmetrical?, Sam Foer

Senior Honors Projects

Through numerous Establishment Clause cases, the Supreme Court has concluded that when public educators promote or denigrate religious views in the K-12 classroom, they violate the First Amendment. The Court has found that the protection of ‘freedom of conscience’ is embedded in the purpose of the Establishment Clause, which applies most strictly to the public school setting. This is because the sphere of conscience is most vulnerable to invasion in developing minds, and children are in a captive environment at school - they cannot escape from State instruction. Thus, states, school systems, and teachers who impose their religious beliefs onto …

A Light Unseen: The History Of Catholic Legal Education In The United States: A Response To Our Colleagues And Critics, John M. Breen, Lee J. Strang

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Acts Of Meaning, Resource Diagrams, And Essential Learning Behaviors: The Design Evolution Of Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

Lost & Found is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed for teaching medieval religious legal systems. The long-term goals of the project are to change the discourse around religious laws, such as foregrounding the prosocial aspects of religious law such as collaboration, cooperation, and communal sustainability. This design case focuses on the evolution of the design of the mechanics and core systems in the first two tabletop games in the series, informed by over three and a half years’ worth of design notes, playable prototypes, outside design consultations, internal design reviews, playtests, and interviews.

An Appraisal Of Maqāsid Al-ShariʿAh Classic And Recent Literature: Systematic Analysis, Ahmad Syukran Baharuddin Asb, Wan Abdul Fattah Wan Ismail Wafwi, Lukman Abdul Mutalib Lam, Muhammad Hazim Ahmad Mha, Ruqayyah Razak Rr, Nurul Syahirah Saharudin Nss, Muhammad Aiman Abdull Rahim Maar

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Maqāsid al-Shariʿah has been typically defined as the objectives behind the Islamic rulings or the Shariʿah higher intent. This knowledge is very important for the mujtahids and Islamic scholars not only to understand or interpret the Shariʿah legal texts, but also to deduce solutions for contemporary problems faced by Muslims. Maqāsid al-Shariʿah is traditionally divided into three levels of necessity, which are necessities (al-Ḍaruriyyāt), needs (al-Ḥajiyyāt), and luxuries (al-Taḥsiniyyāt). Extensive discussion of maqāsid al-shariʿah in Islamic jurisprudence has led to the classification of five elements of preservation, inter alia, protection of faith or …

Reflections On A More “Catholic” Catholic Legal Education, William M. Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I am grateful to Professors Breen and Strang for their thoughtful book about Catholic legal education in the United States. It is an important topic, and their work promises to be a significant contribution to the conversation about the mission of Catholic law schools. My reflections here will focus on Chapter Five.

All of us participating in this symposium are engaged in the collective enterprise of thinking through and implementing what it means to be a Catholic law school. As a historian, personally I am well aware of the value of studying where we have been as part of the …

Finding Lost & Found: Designer’S Notes From The Process Of Creating A Jewish Game For Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides context for and examines aspects of the design process of a game for learning. Lost & Found (2017a, 2017b) is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed to teach medieval religious legal systems, beginning with Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1180), a cornerstone work of Jewish legal rabbinic literature. Through design narratives, the article demonstrates the complex design decisions faced by the team as they balance the needs of player engagement with learning goals. In the process the designers confront challenges in developing winstates and in working with complex resource management. The article provides insight into the pathways the team …

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 & …

State Bar Efforts To Deny Accreditation To Faith-Based Cle Ethics Programs Sponsored By Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, Bill Piatt

Faculty Articles

Religiously affiliated law schools focus on the integration of faith in the formation of future attorneys and leaders. Yet our students are only our students for three years. We can extend our influence and continue to provide a faith-based perspective to them and to other attorneys during the thirty, forty, or more years of their careers by offering continuing legal education (CLE) courses, which bring attorneys and judges together to provide a model for incorporating faith and morality into our professional roles. However, CLE programs must receive accreditation by state authorities if participants are to receive credit for them. Recently, …

Transactional Clinics As Change Agents In The Trump Era: Lessons From Two Contexts, Priya Baskaran, Michael Haber

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The results of the 2016 presidential election and the efforts by the Trump administration to make sweeping changes to a wide range of federal policies have left communities across the country feeling overwhelmed and threatened. In its first year, the Trump administration has been working steadily to slash budgets for health care, housing, infrastructure, schools, and other public benefits that help low-income and middle-class Americans, while adopting policies and engaging in rhetoric that has made many immigrants, Muslims, people of color, and LGBTQ people feel increasingly vulnerable and marginalized.

The authors of this commentary run law clinics that provide pro …

The Forest And The Trees: What Educational Purposes Can A Course On Christian Legal Thought Serve?, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

In this short essay, I want to consider the educational purposes a course in Christian legal thought might serve. How could having such a course in the curriculum help accomplish the goals of legal education? One can understand why a law school with a Christian identity would want to offer this sort of course. Such law schools embrace a theology that helps adherents make sense of the world, including the world of human law. The less obvious question I want to consider is why a law school that does not subscribe to a particular theological understanding of the world (or …

Interest Groups In The Teaching Of Legal History, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

One reason legal history is more interesting than it was several decades ago is the increased role of interest groups in our accounts of legal change. Diverse movements including law and society, critical legal theory, comparative law, and public choice theory have promoted this development, even among writers who are not predominantly historians. Nonetheless, in my own survey course in American legal history I often push back. Taken too far, interest group theorizing becomes an easy shortcut for assessing legal movements and developments without fully understanding the ideas behind them.

Intellectual history in the United States went into decline because …

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer

Faculty Articles

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …

On "Unease" And "Idealism": Reflections On Pope Benedict Xvi's Educating Young People In Justice And Peace And Its Message For Law Teachers, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

Pope Benedict XVI recently wrote about the challenges facing those who have the responsibility for the education of the next generation. His insights, expressed last year, were addressed not simply to a Catholic audience but to all who look to the future and see the obligation to train young people "in justice and peace" to be a noble vocation and one solution to some of the difficulties that face the modern world. Although it was not directed to, or intended primarily for, law professors, the document has much to say to those whose vocation lies in legal education. This essay …

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 …

Derrick Bell's Narratives As Parables, George H. Taylor

Articles

Use of the narrative form in law and legal analysis remains controversial, especially by advocates of critical race theory. Critics maintain that narratives can distort if they are not sufficiently based on empirical fact or reason. Narratives, the claim goes, must be evaluated on the basis of objective standards. My Article argues that this posture critical of narrative is mistaken. I contend that to comprehend how narratives should be interpreted, their literary character must first be understood.

The Article examines the narratives of Derrick Bell, the preeminent critical race and narrative scholar, and maintains that Bell's narratives should be read …

Pilgrimage Or Exodus?: Responding To Faculty Faith Diversity At Religious Law Schools, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

Religiously affiliated law schools have, for the most part, given little thought to the integration of faculty members who are from faith communities other than their own. The article will consider the question of how religiously affiliated law schools truly include faculty members of all religious faiths in the development of mission and community in such law schools, using the lens of the religious metaphors of pilgrimage and Exodus. After presenting this typology for critiquing law school practices, the author deconstructs the very premises of the question through the metaphors of pilgrimage and Exodus. The author argues that a proper …

Training For Justice: The Global Reach Of Clinical Legal Education, Richard J. Wilson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Interview With Azizah Al-Hibri, Hisham Elkoustaf, Azizah Al-Hibri, Legal Oral History Project, University Of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Legal Oral History Project

For transcript, click the Download button above. For video index, click the link below.

Professor Azizah al-Hibri (L '85) is a Professor Emerita at the University of Richmond Law School, having served on the faculty from 1992 until her retirement in 2012. Her work has centered on developing an Islamic jurisprudence and body of Islamic law that are gender equitable and promote human rights and democratic governance. Professor al-Hibri has authored numerous book chapters, essays, and law review articles on these subjects, and her work has appeared in the highly respected Journal of Law and Religion, Harvard International Review …

Yale Rosenberg: The Scholar And The Teacher Of Jewish Law, Sherman L. Cohn

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the early 1980s, when he was a young professor at the University of Houston Law Center, the author had the occasion to meet Yale Rosenberg. It was clear from their discussion that Professor Rosenberg had a strong interest in Jewish law as well as a strong knowledge base. They discussed teaching such a course at the University of Houston Law Center. Professor Rosenberg was doubtful about teaching a course in Jewish law at a secular law school, particularly one in Texas. But that conversation began a series of conversations where Yale explored in some depth the course that we …

Aba And Aals Accreditation: What’S ‘Religious Diversity’ Got To Do With It?, Robert A. Destro

Scholarly Articles

The subject of this essay is whether, and under what circumstances, the religious commitment of an institution should become an issue in the law school accreditation process. Originally presented at the March 1994, Marquette University Conference on Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, this essay begins with the commonly shared assumption that some tensions do exist between religiously affiliated law schools and their accrediting agencies, the American Bar Association (ABA), and the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). For present purposes, the task will be to differentiate those tensions that arise from the accreditation process itself, and those that arise from the …

Erastian And Sectarian Arguments In Religiously Affiliated American Law Schools, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The legal education establishment in the United States some time ago gave up discouraging religiously affiliated law schools. Its support for them now, however, is conditioned on their approaching religious affiliation in a manner that is seen as consistent with the dominant American attitude toward religion—that religion is a private affair and that public moral issues, including issues of jurisprudence and professional ethics, are secular issues, to be talked about in secular language, pursuant to secular principles, and in a secular style.

I begin here by considering the requirement of the American Bar Association, in its Standards for the Approval …