Religion Law Commons^™

“The Glorious Liberty Of The Children Of God”: Toward A Christian Defense Of Human Rights, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

It will come as a surprise to some human rights lawyers to learn that Christianity was a deep and enduring source of human rights and liberties in the Western legal tradition. Our elementary textbooks have long taught us that the history of human rights began in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Human rights, many of us were taught, were products of the Western Enlightenment—creations of Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire, Hume and Smith, Jefferson and Madison. Rights were the mighty new weapons forged by American and French revolutionaries who fought in the name of political …

Freedom Of Conscience As Religious And Moral Freedom, Michael J. Perry

Faculty Articles

In another essay being published contemporaneously with this one, I have explained that as the concept "human right" is understood both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in all the various international human rights treaties that have followed in the Universal Declaration's wake, a right is a human right if the rationale for establishing and protecting the right-for example, as a treaty-based right-is, in part, that conduct that violates the right violates the imperative, articulated in Article i of the Universal Declaration, to "act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood." Each of the human rights …

The Morality Of Human Rights: A Nonreligious Ground?, Michael J. Perry

Faculty Articles

In the midst of the countless, grotesque inhumanities of the twentieth century, however, there is a heartening story, amply recounted elsewhere: the emergence, in international law, of the morality of human rights. The morality of human rights is not new; in one or another version, the morality is very old. But the emergence of morality in international law, in the period since the end of World War II, is a profoundly important development.

The twentieth century, therefore, was not only the dark and bloody time; the second half of the twentieth century was also the time in which a growing …

Law And Religion In Israel And Iran: How The Integration Of Secular And Spiritual Laws Affects Human Rights And The Potential For Violence, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

Because law and religion are by themselves complex cultural and historical issues, any study of the interaction between the two will be at least as complicated. If one is to understand both a State's current re­ligio-legal regime and what reform measures are most likely to succeed there, it is necessary to understand at least a little of the nation's history and majority religion. Therefore, Part I of this article provides a brief sketch of the principles of the two majority religions at issue in this dis­cussion and an overview of the history of both Israel and Iran. It explains why …