Religion Law Commons^™

Book Review. Liberty: Rethinking An Imperiled Ideal By Glenn Tinder, Daniel O. Conkle

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Eternal Law: The Underpinnings Of Dharma And Karma In The Justice System, Shiv Narayan Persaud

Journal Publications

This article seeks to examine the universal principles of Dharma and Karma as inherent principles within our social system. The hope is to bring about a better understanding of their influences and impact on our justice system by focusing the discussion on the utilization of these concepts by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. in their struggles for justice and equality in two distinct social realities.

The Cultural Limits Of Legal Tolerance, Benjamin Berger

Articles & Book Chapters

This article presents the argument that our understanding of the nature of the relationship between modern constitutionalism and religious difference has suffered with the success of the story of legal tolerance and multiculturalism. Taking up the Canadian case, in which the conventional narrative of legal multiculturalism has such purchase, this piece asks how the interaction of law and religion - and, in particular, the practices of legal tolerance - would look if we sought in earnest to understand law as a component, rather than a curator, of cultural diversity in modern liberal societies. Understanding the law as itself a cultural …

Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

This Article focuses on Habermas’s sophisticated awareness of the tension between secularization of law and legal indeterminacy and treats his discourse theory of law as a significant test of the feasibility of reconciling these claims. In an earlier article, I criticized Habermas’s discourse of justification and his claim that it legitimated the law independently of a religious or metaphysical worldview. Even assuming I was misguided in that critique, this Article argues that Habermas’s discourse of application is incoherent and fails to maintain the secularization of the law in the face of legal indeterminacy. Given Habermas’s failure, contemporary legal theory needs …

Meeting Of The Minds, Part Ii: A Dark And Angry God Arises, Paul J. Heald

Georgia Law Review

In 1988, Professor Heald found a lost manuscript of Steve Allen's groundbreaking television show, "A Meeting of the Minds."' In that episode, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Kelman, Blaise Pascal, and Richard Posner discussed the nature of law.2 While completing renovation of a house, possibly visited by Allen, Heald recently found another manuscript jammed on top of an old water tank...

Legal Commitments And Religious Commitments, Jospeh Vining

Articles

In his elegant and accessible new book, Law's Quandary, Steven Smith groups our various senses of what is real for us into ontological families: the mundane; the scientific, including mathematics; and the religious. These supply "lumberyards," as it were, for thought and discussion about the world and action in it. Law itself is not one of them. Those involved in law, as citizens or professionals practicing law or speaking for or about law, are presented in the book as looking out from law to the ontological resources available in the lumberyards he describes.

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.

Roger Williams On Liberty Of Conscience, Edward J. Eberle

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Jewish Law View Of World Law, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

This paper will explore two basic Jewish law questions which reflect on the technical issues related to Professor Berman's world law proposal. The first question asks how Jewish law views public international law and whether public international law can be incorporated into the corpus of Jewish law. The second question asks how Jewish law generally incorporates domestic (municipal) law into Jewish law and if this classical paradigm of integration assists in formulating a Jewish law view of world law. To the best of my knowledge, the first matter is a question of nearly first impression in the Jewish law literature.

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 …

Collective Guilt And Collective Punishment, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Attitudes toward collective guilt in the Middle East require us to take a closer look at guilt in the Bible. It turns out the text of Genesis is conflicted. Some passages support a theory of guilt linked with the inevitability of cleansing and punishment; other passages appear to treat guilt as a psychological state that might be cured by a confession of sins. The tension is important today in trying to understand whether the collective guilt of nations should also entail collective punishment.

Is There An Implicit Theology In The Practice Of Ordinary Law?, Joseph Vining

Articles

We should have a text to help us-lawyers and theologians almost always do. Consider this from Wordsworth, and ask whether it goes too far if Wordsworth were thought to be speaking to the practicing lawyer: Here you stand, Adore, and worship, when you know it not; Pious beyond the intention of your thought; Devout above the meaning of your will. -Yes, you have felt, and may not cease to feel. The estate of Man would be indeed forlorn If false conclusions of the reasoning Power Made the Eye blind, and closed the passages Through which the Ear converses with the …

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 …

Review Of What Are Freedoms For?, By John H. Garvey, Scott D. Pomfret

Michigan Law Review

In 1988, Jeffrey Kendall and Barbara Zeitler Kendall were married. Though Jeffrey was Catholic at the time and Barbara was Jewish, the couple agreed to raise their children in Barbara's faith. In 1991, Jeffrey joined Boston Church of Christ, a fundamentalist Christian church. The tenets of that faith include a belief that those who do not accept Jesus Christ are damned to Hell, where there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Barbara's faith also underwent a change during the marriage: she became an Orthodox Jew. Citing irreconcilable differences, the Kendalls sought a divorce in November, 1994. Before their marriage …

Review Of Political Theory For Mortals: Shades Of Justice, Images Of Death, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

Daring to go where plenty of mortals have gone before him, John Seery sets out to explore death. The resulting volume, more episodic than sustained, is brash, even feverishly energetic, as though Seery is desperately cheery about his chosen topic. This book is by turns witty and irritating, its interesting conjectures and lines of argument intimately mixed up with what this stodgy reader saw as frivolous posturing. It's easy to lampoon Seery's prose style; in fact, all one needs to do is quote it. Socrates, we learn, is "a blowhard buffoon," or at least readers might reasonably see him that …

Death Penalty: A Philosophical And Theological Perspective, 30 J. Marshall L. Rev. 463 (1997), Walter Berns, Nancy Bothne, William Bowers, Richard Dieter, Richard Land, James Lund, Austin Sarat

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Habermas’S Discourse Theory Of Law And The Relationship Between Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

The relationship between law and religion has become the subject of a sustained and robust debate. However, unlike earlier theological attempts to ground law in religion or the Divine, participants in the modem debate rarely, if ever, argue for a theological or religious legitimation of law. Either implicitly or explicitly, there appears to be a modem consensus among legal scholars and philosophers that the world has been disenchanted. The world can no longer be viewed as an integrated, meaningful whole under a comprehensive religious or metaphysical worldview, and law can no longer be legitimized by its religious or metaphysical foundations. …

The Cosmological Question: A Response To Milner S. Ball's 'All The Company Of Heaven', Joseph Vining

Articles

We do not disagree, and I do not doubt, that legal processes are sources of injustice, violent oppression, crushing of the spirit, destruction of lives, actual death. I have only to look at The Trial1 again. Nor do we disagree that there are strings of words, statements, put out by officials, lawyers, and lawyer-academics, often called "rules," that cannot be taken into oneself and that by their very nature evoke manipulation in response, avoidance if they cannot be ignored. In their name violent imposition of pure will occurs all the time, and power is exercised by those who can secure …

The Pope's Submarine, John H. Garvey

San Diego Law Review

This Article looks at the conflict between religious authority and liberal politics from a point of view within the Catholic Church. It examines the grounds of the teaching authority asserted by the Church, the scope and strength of that authority, and the possibility that obedience to authority will create dilemmas for religiously committed public officials. For purposes of illustration it uses New York Governor Mario Cuomo's religious and political observations on the subject of abortion.

The Problem Of Dirty Hands, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

This essay examines what Sartre called the problem of "dirty hands" as it applies to two issues in contemporary Catholic discussions of political morality. Beginning with Michael Walzer's work on dirty hands, the essay next identifies four approaches to this problem characteristic of Christian ethics. These four categories are then applied to analysis of two issues: conflicts of conscience that may confront Catholic politicians as a result of the responsibilities of public office and the church's exclusion of clergy and religious from holding public

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 …

Wu: Fountain Of Justice, Thomas E. Davitt S.J.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Fountain of Justice. By John C.H. Wu.

Civil Government. Its Origin, Mission, And Destiny, And The Christian's Relation To It., David Lipscomb

Stone-Campbell Books

No abstract provided.