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University of Michigan Law School

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Religion Law

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Law

What's Real For Law?, Jospeh Vining Jan 2006

What's Real For Law?, Jospeh Vining

Articles

Law is not academic. The univeristy if not its home. Law is in the wider world and is pervasive there, in language, thought, and action.


How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White Jan 2002

How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White

Articles

I want to start today with an account of the way lawyers think and speak, and then ask whether it might be useful for the theologically minded to take these practices and procedures seriously as a ground of comparison from which to look at their own. In doing this I shall look at the practice of law with an emphasis not on its social effects or ethical difficulties but on the nature of the activity itself, viewed from the inside, asking in particular what kind of knowledge it requires and creates in its practitioner. What does the lawyer learn from …


How To Talk About Religion, James Boyd White Jan 2001

How To Talk About Religion, James Boyd White

Articles

Our experience, supported we think by that of others, is that it is most difficult to do this well, whether we are trying to talk about religion within a discipline, such as law or psychology or anthropology, or even in more informal ways, with our friends and colleagues. There are many reasons for this: It is in the nature of religious experience to be ineffable or mysterious, at least for some people or in some religions; different religions imagine the world and its human inhabitants, and their histories, in ways that are enormously different; and there is no superlanguage into …


Talking About Religion In The Language Of The Law: Impossible But Necessary, James Boyd White Jan 1998

Talking About Religion In The Language Of The Law: Impossible But Necessary, James Boyd White

Articles

In speaking to this conference about religion and law I am in a decidedly peculiar position, for it may be that every one of you has thought longer and harder about the relation between these two forms of life than I have. When Scott Idleman first asked me to talk to you, I explained that I was no expert, to put it mildly, and that the most that I could offer would be the reflections of a neophyte. He said that this was fine-perhaps he was just desperate for a speaker; perhaps he thought that it might be helpful to …


Response To Judging Religion By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (Symposium: Religion And The Judicial Process: Legal, Ethical, And Empirical Dimensions), James Boyd White Jan 1998

Response To Judging Religion By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (Symposium: Religion And The Judicial Process: Legal, Ethical, And Empirical Dimensions), James Boyd White

Articles

In her paper Professor Sullivan sets forth an admirable ideal: that we in the law should talk about religion as a distinctive human activity, without either engaging in theology ourselves or erasing what is important about religion. We: should, in her words, learn to acknowledge religion without establishing it. For this activity, as she has also argued in Paying the Words Extra, the discipline of the history of religion can serve as a model, for there too people strive to reflect what is distinctive about religion without committing themselves to the validity of a particular theology or set of religious …


Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining Jan 1989

Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining

Articles

Not long ago, any question of the kind "How may theology serve as a resource in understanding law?" would have been hardly conceivable among lawyers. When Lon Fuller brought out his first book in 1940, The Law in Quest of Itself, he could think of no better way of tagging his adversary the legal positivist than to note a "parallel between theoretical theology and analytical jurisprudence." Two decades later, in the name of realism, Thurman Arnold dismissed Henry Hart's non-positivist jurisprudence in harsh terms. A master of the cutting phrase, he confidently entitled his attack "Professor Hart's Theology." Two decades …


Privacy In Confucian And Taoist Thought, Christina B. Whitman Jan 1985

Privacy In Confucian And Taoist Thought, Christina B. Whitman

Book Chapters

Only three aspects of the broad concept "privacy" will be explored in this essay: privacy as providing a sphere for intimate personal relationships with family and friends, privacy as freedom from surveillance for purposes of gathering personal information, and privacy as freedom from interference by government or social controls. These concepts describe quite different concerns. They are often grouped together under the single term "privacy," but not without some strain... A comparison between a modern Western value and its counterpart, if any, in very early Confucian and Taoist belief is inevitably somewhat strained. But it serves a purpose. If nothing …