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Full-Text Articles in Religion Law

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer Jan 2014

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 …


The Study Of Secularism And Religion In The Constitution And Contemporary Politics Of Turkey: The Rise Of Interdisciplinarity And The Decline Of Methodology?, Russell Powell Jan 2010

The Study Of Secularism And Religion In The Constitution And Contemporary Politics Of Turkey: The Rise Of Interdisciplinarity And The Decline Of Methodology?, Russell Powell

Faculty Articles

Using the experience of Islamist parties in Turkey as a comparative example, this article explores whether political parties with deeply held religious ideologies can integrate themselves into liberal democracies, paying particular attention to the nature and role of legal secularism (the mechanism states use to insulate themselves from religious influence). This is an extension of the query whether the rise of illiberal political groups eventually leads to the end of liberal society. These queries engage the assumption that illiberal religious ideology is incapable of tolerating dissent or pluralism. This article examines Turkish constitutional secularism as well as the “Islamist” Justice …


Zakat: Drawing Insights For Legal Theory And Economic Policy From Islamic Jurisprudence, Russell Powell Jan 2010

Zakat: Drawing Insights For Legal Theory And Economic Policy From Islamic Jurisprudence, Russell Powell

Faculty Articles

The rapid development of complex income taxation and welfare systems in the 20th century may give the impression that progressive wealth redistribution systems are uniquely modern. However, religious systems provided similar mechanisms for addressing economic injustice and poverty alleviation centuries earlier. Zakat is the obligation of almsgiving and is the third pillar of Islam - a requirement for all believers. In the early development of the Islamic community, zakat was collected as a tax by the state and the funds were distributed to a defined set of needy groups. As a theoretical matter, there are three insights that make zakat …