Law Commons^™

New Adventures Of Old Pauline Law, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

This article examines the idea of law within two recent philosophical approaches to a theological text. Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, two postmodern philosophers on the political left, look to the letters of St. Paul for the definition and extraction of the political subject. They look to Paul’s messianism and his conversion to discover, within their own philosophical projects, what is truly political within the Western philosophical tradition, for which Paul’s theology is unconditional. The article focuses on the conception of law that, in turn, derives from these projects. The article suggests that within both, despite the objective rejection of …

Revelation And Idolatry: Holy Law And Holy Terror, Regina Schwartz

Faculty Working Papers

THE Book of Exodus desscribes the identity of justice and the law. Because elsewhere the gap between justice and the law is so wide -- in Christian theology when it sees the Pharisaic law as inhibiting the realization of justice; in philosophy where from Plato on, law is formal while is justice substantive; in political theory, which includes those who endorse "procedural justice" when they abandon substantive justice -- this radical biblical vision, wherein the law is justice is surely unique. This is not an understanding of the law as a series of prescriptions, the "yoke of the law" but …

Faithful Hermeneutics, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools on January 9, 2009 as part of a panel on "Scriptural and Constitutional Hermeneutics." The panel was co-sponsored by the Law and Religion Section, Section on Jewish Law, and Section on Islamic Law, and the papers will be published by the Michigan State Law Review.

My article compares legal and religious hermeneutics by exploring the dual nature of what I term "faithful hermeneutics." The ambiguity evoked by this phrase is intentional. On one hand, it suggests an investigation of the relationship between legal and religious …