Religion Law Commons^™

A Religious Right To Abortion: Legal History And Analysis, Law, Rights, And Religion Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

There is a long and rich history of religious support, across a wide range of faith traditions, for the right to reproductive autonomy, including abortion. A number of religious denominations, including the Presbyterian Church, Reform and Conservative Judaism, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalist Association, support a legal right to abortion in most or all circumstances. Several religious denominations have even — long before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — issued statements explaining that the right to reproductive health care is an essential aspect of their members’ religious …

2nd Circuit Court Of Appeals Revives Religious Adoption Agency’S Challenge To New York Anti-Discrimination Rule, Arthur S. Leonard

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Searching The Legacy Of The Reformation For Lutheran Responses To Modern Family Law, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

This article builds upon historical work on changes in the law of marriage, divorce and the family after the Reformation, and describes how modern Lutheran theology, formed during the Reformation, evaluates modern trends in American family law. From the key Lutheran theological insight that God is creatively ordering human activity as a partner with human beings, the Lutheran tradition approaches issues such as no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage with both trust and challenge.

The Case For American Muslim Arbitration, Rabea Benhalim

Publications

This Article advocates for the creation of Muslim arbitral tribunals in the United States. These tribunals would better meet the needs of American Muslims, who currently bring their religious disputes to informal forums that lack transparency. Particularly problematic, these existing forums often apply legal precedent developed in majority-Muslim nations, without taking into consideration the changed circumstances of Muslim living as minorities in the United States. These interpretations of Islamic law can have especially negative impacts on women. American Muslim arbitration tribunals offer the potential to correct these inadequacies. Furthermore, a new arbitral system could better meet the needs of sophisticated …

Women’S Divorce Rights In Jordan: Legal Rights And Cultural Challenges, Helen David

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research aims to examine women’s divorce rights in Jordan examining the topic both through their legal rights as well as through the cultural challenges and stigma that divorced women face. The research is focused specifically on the rights of Muslim women, who have to file for divorce through the Shari’a court system, in Jordan that are Jordanian nationals. The literature used in the research provides background insight into Jordan’s tribal system, family law in Jordan, and psychological theories that relate to group therapy and self-efficacy in divorced women. The researcher hypothesizes that despite the many socio-economic and legal reasons …

There Are No Ordinary People: Christian Humanism And Christian Legal Thought, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

This short essay is a contribution to a volume celebrating a new casebook, "Christian Legal Thought: Materials and Cases", edited by Profs. Patrick McKinley Brennan and William S. Brewbaker.

The Ecclesiastical Tribunals Field Hospital For Wounded Marriages: The New Matrimonial Processus Brevoir, Roberto Rosas

Faculty Articles

This article will focus on explaining the new marriage annulment processes of the Latin Church, which are found in the Motu proprio Mitis ludex Dominus lesus, although the same processes apply to the processes in the Eastern Churches. Any differences that exist between the two processes are due to the distinct ecclesiastical structure between one Church and another.

This explanation will advance the following points: (1) marriage; (2) reasons for a new matrimonial process; (3) guiding principles for the new process; (4) pastoral footprint of service to the faithful in ecclesiastic tribunals; (5) actualization of the ecclesiastic structure; (6) the …

The Role Of Personal Laws In Creating A “Second Sex”, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Indira Jaising

All Faculty Scholarship

The cultural construction of gender determines the role of women and girls within the family in many societies. Gendered notions of power in the family are often shrouded in religion and custom and find their deepest expression in Personal Laws. This essay examines the international law framework as it relates to personal laws and the commonality of narratives of litigators and plaintiffs in the cases from the three different personal law systems in India.

Multicultural Adr And Family Law: A Brief Introduction To The Complexities Of Religious Arbitration, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

Recent polls indicate that the U.S. population is getting less religious and more secular. This seems to mirror the nation’s— and its laws’—movement away from reflecting certain traditional values. While these movements have left some members of the religious population in a precarious situation, surrounded by a society whose values are changing before their eyes, it has also caused the religious to cling tighter to their respective faiths and become more entrenched in the values they assert.

As the government has, slowly but surely, aligned itself with the popular shift away from traditional religious values, the pleas of the religious …

Religiously-Motivated Medical Neglect: A Response To Professors Levin, Jacobs, And Arora, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

This Response to Professors Levin, Jacobs, and Arora’s article To Accommodate or Not to Accommodate: (When) Should the State Regulate Religion to Protect the Rights of Children and Third Parties? focuses on their claim that the law governing religious exemptions to medical neglect is messy, unprincipled, and in need of reform, including because it violates the Establishment Clause. I disagree with this assessment and provide support for my position. Specifically, I summarize and assess the current state of this law and its foundation in the perennial tussle between parental rights and state authority to make decisions for and about the …

Granting Exemptions From Legal Duties: When Are They Warranted And What Is The Place Of Religion?, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In what follows, I focus on when exemptions from legal duties are called for and whether religion should be a crucial ingredient. I concentrate especially on the present controversy over same-sex marriage, and how far people and organizations should be required to afford those couples equal status. But other kinds of exemptions can help us understand various general questions and provide key insights about this intense concern of our time.

My basic conclusions are these: religious convictions and practices do matter but only sometimes should they be legally distinguished from other bases. Considering all that is at stake, certain exemptions …

Religion And Child Custody, Margaret Brinig

Journal Articles

This piece draws upon divorce pleadings and other records to show how indications of religion (or disaffiliation) that appear in custody agreements and orders (called “parenting plans” in both states studied) affect the course of the proceedings and legal activities over the five years following divorce filing. Some of the apparent findings are normative, but most are merely descriptive and some may be correlative rather than caused by the indicated concern about religion. While parenting plans are accepted by courts only when they are in the best interests of the child (at least in theory), the child’s independent religious needs …

Book Review Of The Child Cases: How America's Religious Exemption Laws Harm Children, James G. Dwyer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Religion And Marriage Equality Statutes, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

To date, every state statute that has extended marriage equality to gay and lesbian couples has included accommodations for actors who oppose such marriages on religious grounds. Debate over those accommodations has occurred mostly between, on the one hand, people who urge broader religion protections and, on the other hand, those who support the types of accommodations that typically have appeared in existing statutes. This article argues that the debate should be widened to include arguments that the existing accommodations are normatively and constitutionally problematic. Even states that presumptively are most friendly to LGBT citizens, as measured by their demonstrated …

"I Now Pronounce You Husband And Wives": The Case For Polygamous Marriage After United States V. Windsor And Burwell V. Hobby Lobby Stores, Peter N. Swisher

Law Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to question the continuing validity of Reynolds in light of subsequent United States Supreme Court deci- sions, including-most recently-UnitedStates v. Windsor and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Based upon these subsequent Supreme Court decisions, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, proponents of polygamous marriage now have a very strong case for validating polygamous marriages on cultural, religious, and constitutional grounds.

Sans Foi, Ni Loi. Appearances Of Conjugality And Lawless Love, Régine Tremblay

All Faculty Publications

This chapter deals with paradigm shifts in the legal regulation of adult intimate relationships. It includes the shifts from a unique conjugality to the multiplication of conjugalities, from marriage until death do us part to multiple subsequent unions, and from mimicking marriage by necessity to mimicking marriage by choice. Such changes open the floor for questions about the relevance of regulating adult intimate relationships today, or at the very least, about the compulsion to conceive of this kind of relationship as the cornerstone of Canadian family law. As such, it questions shifts in latent elements of the regulation of conjugality …

Translating Religious Principles Into German Law: Boundaries And Contradictions, Pascale Fournier, Régine Tremblay

All Faculty Publications

First we present the basic rules of Islamic and Jewish law and the German state law that regulates them. Next we contend that the boundaries for shaping and applying religious norms are blurry. We argue that the conflicting outcomes might be explained by boundless discretion and informality in the religious adjudication process, but that this structure is not foreign to so-called secular family law. Thus, if the project of recognizing religious principles when it comes to family law is to be maintained, it must take stock of the conceptual and practical conflicts that inhere to the sphere of family law, …

Sacred Trust Or Sacred Right?, Jeffrey Shulman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the first chapter from The Constitutional Parent: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Enfranchisement of the Child (Yale University Press, 2014.)

It is commonly assumed that parents have long enjoyed a fundamental legal right to control the upbringing of their children, but this reading of the law is sorely incomplete. What is deeply rooted in our legal traditions is the idea that the state entrusts parents with custody of the child, and the concomitant rule that the state does so only as long as parents meet their legal duty to take proper care of the child. This book looks at …

Canon 1095 And The Dignitas Connubii: The Role Of Consent, Incapacity, And Psychic Anomalies In Cases Of Matrimonial Nullity, Roberto Rosas

Faculty Articles

This Article will focus on the following points: (1) the essential elements of marriage; (2) the basic principle of matrimonial consent; (3) the nature of consent; (4) acts through which consent is formed; (5) matrimonial nullity in Canon Law; (6) Canon Law and the Dignitas Connubil (Dignitas); and (7) recent jurisprudence concerning matrimonial nullity. It aims to shed light and clarify paragraphs 2 and 3 of Canon 1095 of the Code by making clear how the causes of defect of discretion of judgment and the inability to assume the essential obligations due to some sort of psychic disorder or anomaly …

“The Pursuit Of Happiness” Comes Home To Roost? Same-Sex Union, The Summum Bonum, And Equality, Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Working Paper Series

John Locke understood human happiness to amount to the removal of "uneasiness." This paper argues that,to the extent that the United States is a nation dedicated to "the pursuit of happiness" understood as the removal of "uneasiness," same-sex unions or marriages should be given legal recognition. While Locke defended a variation on traditional marriage on the grounds of progenitiveness and care for dependent offspring, his more foundational commitment to the importance of the removal of uneasiness precludes, on pain of inconsistency, limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples. This paper argues, furthermore, that conservatives and neo-conservatives who celebrate this nation's being …

Conscientious Objection To Creating Same-Sex Unions: An International Analysis, Bruce Macdougall, Elsje Bonthuys, Kenneth Mck. Norrie, Marjolein Van Den Brink

All Faculty Publications

In jurisdictions that recognize same-sex marriages and unions, the question arises as to the extent to which civic officials who normally preside at such unions can refuse such participation for religious reasons. This paper examines this issue in the context of four jurisdictions: Scotland, Canada, the Netherlands and South Africa. What is striking is how different is the process of reaching a resolution in each jurisdiction, though the actual result might be the same. This difference arises because of the jurisdiction-specific reasons why same-sex marriages and unions are recognized, how they are recognized, the status of the officers who preside …

Bridging The Great Divide--A Response To Linda Greenhouse And Reva B. Siegel's Before (And After) Roe V. Wade: New Questions About Backlash, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This essay discusses the history of Roe v. Wade as recently addressed by Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel. Going beyond their assertions, I suggest that an additional, more encompassing inquiry focuses on what factors are implicated in the politics of abortion and how these factors relate to larger social, political, and cultural conflicts both before and after Roe. By naming party politics and the Catholic Church, Greenhouse and Siegel posit two crucial elements that shaped the abortion debate. I assert, however, that what is not discussed in their Article is the way numerous other factors have figured into …

Family Law's Challenge To Religious Liberty, Raymond C. O'Brien

Scholarly Articles

This Article argues that challenges made to family law structures have provoked a significant reaction from persons and religious organizations advocating a distinctive worldview based on religious and historical values. Additionally, as family law changes from being a product of a religioushistorical worldview to being a product of private-ordering, the religious liberty of worldview adherents has been challenged. The struggle is apparent in the debates during the 2012 presidential election and is evidenced in government mandates that include, among other requirements, that employersincluding religious organizations-provide insurance coverage for employees that include contraception. Although many aspects of family law have been …

Who Owns The Soul Of The Child?: An Essay On Religious Parenting Rights And The Enfranchisement Of The Child, Jeffrey Shulman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

At common law, and (for most of the nation's history) under state statutory regimes, the authority of the parent to direct the child's upbringing was a matter of duty, not right, and chief among parental obligations was the duty to provide the child with a suitable education. It has long been a legal commonplace that at common law the parent had a "sacred right" to the custody of his or her child, that the parent's right to control the upbringing of the child was almost absolute. But this reading of the law is sorely anachronistic, less history than advocacy on …

Criminal And Civil Law In The Torah: The Mosaic Law In Christian Perspective, David A. Skeel Jr., Tremper Longman

All Faculty Scholarship

When Jesus spoke of fulfilling the law and the prophets, he was referring to the Mosaic law, nearly all of which is in the four books we consider in this Article: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In an effort to discern the Mosaic law’s guidance for contemporary secular law, we first place it in covenantal perspective and identify three of its key concerns: God’s nature, as revealed in Scripture; the nature of Israel; and the role of the land. After summarizing the regulation in the four books under consideration and noting a few of its characteristics, we conclude by discussing …

Are Christians Fit To Be Parents And Guardians—The Case Of Johns V. Derby City Council, Robert J. Araujo S.J.

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Religion In The Abortion Discourse In Singapore: A Case Study Of The Relevance Of Religious Arguments In Law-Making In Multi-Religious Democracies, Seow Hon Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The article discusses the social issue on religion in the abortion discourse in Singapore. It mentions the relevance of religious arguments in law-making in multi-religious democracies. It notes that laws on abortion vary across different jurisdictions, like prohibiting abortion under all circumstances to freely allowing it without restriction as to reason.

Bargaining In The Shadow Of God's Law: Islamic Mahr Contracts And The Perils Of Legal Specialization, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Fallacy Of Neutrality From Beginning To End: The Battle Between Religious Liberties And Rights Based On Homosexual Conduct, Rena M. Lindevaldsen

Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Bible plainly states that everyone must either "bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" or continue as "enemies in your mind." Un-Biblical thinking, like un-Bibical actions, leads one on a path away from God. Part II of this Article will briefly introduce a Biblical approach to thinking about contemporary issues and discuss how Christians can unwittingly abandon distinctively Biblical thinking under the guise of neutrality. Part III will present a number of cases that highlight the fallacy of neutrality in the battle between religious liberties and rights based on homosexual conduct. Part IV will contend that …

Insubstantial Burdens: The Case For Government Employee Exemptions To Same-Sex Marriage Laws, Robin Fretwell Wilson

Scholarly Articles

The case for accommodating religious objectors to same-sex marriage has met significant resistance on a number of fronts. Some believe that religious exemptions permit objectors to dodge legal duties to serve same-sex couples that would otherwise apply. Critics charge that, if extended to public employees, such exemptions would burden the ability of same-sex couples to marry. Others argue that exemptions coddle wrong-headed people who really do not have a legitimate reason for objecting and who, therefore, should not be legally excused. A review of the nearly half-dozen new same-sex marriage laws enacted in the past year suggests that the least …